She finds herself in a short alley between two long, low buildings: from the signage and miscellaneous tools and furniture stacked and piled behind them, she may be able to gather that they're stores, and from the smell in the air, at least one must be a restaurant. It's early evening, dark enough that the lights dotting the backs of the buildings are lit and useful, but there's still some light in the sky as well; the air is just beginning to chill, suggesting that it's late spring or early summer in a temperate climate.

She has absolutely no idea where she is! And she has no idea what kind of place has enough wealth to afford all that lighting. Are they Fire artifacts? She can't tell, and she's too apprehensive to try and examine any of them more closely. She does gather that they're stores, even though she doesn't understand any of the signage or words.

She ought to find shelter or warmer clothes. It's the middle of summer where she came from, and she's wearing a loose long-sleeved seersucker shirt tucked into pants – full coverage so that mosquitoes can't get to her. It saves her from having to use Telepathy to tell them to go away. She also had a wide-brimmed hat to go along with it, but it got left behind.

She'll keep walking, hoping to find someone who's speaking Towan so they can translate for her, or find some sort of map or city office to orient herself with.

Heading to the nearer end of the alley takes her past the dumpster where the stores bring their trash.

There appears to be someone lying on the ground next to it, tucked halfway behind it in a way that makes them easy to overlook; from the way they're lying it seems unlikely that they're conscious.

She does a double take at them, but she does notice them.

Are they asleep? Are they intoxicated? Are they dead she will go over to them to check. Are they breathing?

"Hello? Are you okay?" she asks in Towan. It's a tonal language with lots of vowel clusters – the Earth language it's phonetically closest to is Vietnamese.

The person turns out to be a teenage girl with light skin and dark brown hair, looking very underweight; she's breathing, but doesn't wake when approached or spoken to, and something about the way she looks suggests that she's really not in very good shape even beyond the apparent malnutrition.

Oh dear. This very much does not look like someone who's intoxicated and passed out. She can't see any external injuries. There might be internal ones. 

She has no idea if there's a hospital nearby, or even if there is one in this village. She has no idea how big it is, even though it seems rich, and apparently she doesn't know the language here. 

Trying to do a major healing ritual on her, alone, is doable, but it will absolutely give her backlash. It will be embarrassing and humiliating. But she can deal with embarrassing and humiliating – this girl clearly needs help, and here she is, able to help her. 

She'll clear away the trash and other detritus around her body to try to make some semblance of a proper ritual space. This is a terribly dissonant space for Flowers workings, but she doesn't want to risk moving her, in case it jostles something inside her that makes her situation worse. 

Marina will take a few deep breaths before starting. She's done this ritual many times before, and she has very good Control. She turns her mind away from the repulsive smell of garbage and starts dancing. It's a very strenuous dance with lots of jumping and hopping – a mix between ballet and step dancing. It's good that the Way of Flowers is the Way of vigor, because there is no way she would be able to do this at 42 years old without physical enhancement. She doesn't keep any sort of fitness routine.

She thinks about the girl – she doesn't know her name, but she's around the age to be taking the adulthood examination. She thinks about her, well-fed, dancing with her, running, jumping, and she wills it. She feels the energy pour out from her, more, more, until her personal energy reserves are exhausted and she's channeling energy.

It's exhilarating. She feels the joy of Flowers as she channels: the Way of ecstasy, the Way of abundance, the Way of beauty. Yes, truly, beauty and goodness may arise even in this fetid, forgotten place. It's terrible. She knows that she's going to go into backlash the moment the ritual ends, and she is dreading it. But Marina is a disciplined and experienced ritualist, and she tucks that thought away into the back of her mind to be dealt with by her future self.

She dances, occasionally lifting the girl's hand up and holding it, as though they were a pair dancing during the Spring Festival. 

The girl stirs, and twitches away in startlement even before her eyes are open. She's soon looking at her newly-functional limbs in clear surprise and wonderment, though.

She'll continue the ritual for another minute more. Many Flowers rituals are open-ended, and you have to choose when to stop it. She doesn't want to end too early in case she didn't heal her enough – this space is very bad and she's definitely getting terrible efficiency ratios.

She stops the ritual and bursts into tears. Marina will kneel next to her, and very carefully place her head on her lap, and brush her hair with her hands. "It's okay. I'm here. Marina's here. I love you. You're not alone anymore," she says in Towan, in the same tones a mother would use to soothe a crying baby. She radiates relief and affection and concern, both figuratively and literally. Denice will be able to feel the emotions coming off of her.

The girl flinches and tenses when Marina touches her, but doesn't struggle, and physically relaxes after a moment, though she's still quite worried and confused at the situation and not really letting her guard down. After a few seconds it occurs to her to pat Marina's knee and murmur something comforting back.

Marina smiles when Denice pats her knee, but she doesn't stop crying. She's crying silently, with the tears just rolling off of her face. She continues brushing Denice's hair with her hands, and she starts humming. It's the melody to one of the slow dance folk songs played at the Spring Festival. 

She doesn't feel tired at all. In fact, she feels even more energized that when she started. She can still feel the Flowers energy flowing through her.

She will start babbling in Towan about being worried about her, and asking her why she was lying here, and how she feels, and what Marina can do for her, all in soft tones. She is, distantly, aware that she is acting very personal and friendly towards someone she met mere minutes ago, but that Marina is very far away and Flowers-energized Marina is in full control here.

It's pretty strange, but the woman just saved her life, so Denice isn't going to complain about a little strangeness. Maybe this is just what people outside of institutions are like, though if so it's odd that none of the TV she's seen has shown it. In any case, she'll stay still and quiet and be petted and keep watch for anyone headed toward the alley.

They get perhaps fifteen uninterrupted minutes, and then she hears one of the workers from one of the shops heading out for a smoke break, and pulls the strange woman behind the dumpster, gesturing for her to be quiet.

Marina is unfamiliar with the gesture, but the Way of Flowers is the Way of connection, and thus she successfully intuits what Denice is trying to say, though not why she needs to be quiet. Why should she be quiet about the affection and concern she has for her? The Way of Flowers is the Way of uninhibitedness – it demands to be able to ripen and flower into its full potential. But she does care about her, and so she'll be quiet. For now. And also let herself be tugged behind the dumpster.

Actually, there's a way for her to keep talking even though she has to be quiet! She's a Flowers Scholar after all. And they're touching, so it's cheaper.

She casts Telepathy. It's merely a mental action to cast it.

:Hello! I'm Marina. I was so worried about you.: And there is an accompanying rush of emotion – deep, deep, heartfelt worry, the same worry you'd feel about someone you love hurt, someone you love missing. It is genuine and intense.

Are you hurt? Are you still hurting?: And another wave of emotion, this time of empathy and sympathy and wanting to relieve pain, of not being able to bear seeing others suffer, because their suffering is your suffering. 

:Where are we? Why do we have to be quiet?:

...uh. Well, it's not like she didn't know that the woman was a cape or that capes sometimes have more than one power, she guesses. :Denice. I'm fine. Someone's coming.: Holding herself separate from the waves of emotion is hard, but obviously vitally important; it's not safe at all to trust a stranger like that, even a friendly one, and even if it was they can't afford to both be distracted. :Are you okay?:

:It is lovely to meet you, Denice.: She picks up on the undertones of danger behind Denice's mental thoughts, but Flowering Marina does not, on a deep level, understand why they have to keep quiet because someone is coming. Why can't they just say hello? But Flowering Marina also picks up on how important this is to Denice, and she wouldn't want to upset her.

Is she okay. Yes! She's better than okay. Wait. Actually she might not be okay? Her instincts from casting training tell her to separate herself and be alone so that backlash will resolve quicker, but that sounds terrible! And is it even true? What she's feeling now is real and true, and she thinks she trusts that more than something someone told her a while back.

She's very happy that Denice cares about her too!

:Yes! Better than okay.: Gratefulness over her reciprocating caring. :It took a lot of energy to heal you and this causes temporary mental changes in me. But that's okay, as long as you're safe.:

:I'm much better - I think you saved my life and I appreciate that - but it's not safe for anyone else to find me, they'll want to take me someplace bad. But they won't stay out here long if they don't notice us, and then we can leave. - I'm a cape too, super hearing, I can keep us away from people.:

Concern. :What is the bad place. Also, I don't know what a cape is: people can transmit more than words with Telepathy, and she's getting 'cloak, jacket' from that, but she can tell that that's clearly a metaphor and not the intended thing. Does it mean Practitioners? :and so I can't say whether I am one.:

:Super hearing! Are you a Flowers Practitioner like me too? Or Perfect? Or Open?: A jumble of concepts that she doesn't dwell on too much, but which Denice will get the gists of – connection, perfection, curiosity, respectively.

:The bad place is where I was before, and if I think about it very much I'll get too upset to keep us safe. Capes are people with powers, like Scion or Alexandria. Normal people can't talk in peoples' heads, so you're a cape. I don't know what flowers have to do with it, or those other things, I haven't had a chance to learn much. - she isn't looking this way, we can probably go now if we're careful, but I'd rather stay here until she's gone if you're okay with that.:

She feels the suppressed upsettedness and will not pry.

:I can wait until she's gone.:

Flowers backlash affects emotions, but it doesn't affect epistemics. For a moment, her academic instincts take over.

:Wait. I'm being stupid. I need to restart from a lower context prior.: And she carefully packages up and sends a bundle of concepts, neatly laid out, rather than merely shoving it at her.

There are Six Ways that correspond to the six natures of the soul: the Way of Flowers, the Way I follow, but also the Way of Tranquility, the Way of the Open Door, the Way of Fire, the Way of the True Self, and the Way of the Perfect Self.

People who follow Ways are called Practitioners.

Flowers Practitioners can cast Telepathy, which is how I'm talking to you right now.

I was visiting my university when I was transported here. I think it was from an Open ritual gone wrong. Openeds can do portal effects.

And then, in another bundle,

I don't know what capes are. I don't know who Scion and Alexandria are. I don't know the language here or where I am or whether I'll be able to get to see my children again or my friends or my—

and the structured transmission abruptly terminates as Marina has to clamp her hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming and sobbing in fear and grief, because what if she can't get back.

And there goes any chance Denice had of dispelling the panic attack that's been lurking around the edges of her mind. She's quiet about it, hugging Marina tight and trembling, long practice having eradicated every trace of impulse to make a sound.

And Marina will embrace her in turn, both to comfort herself and Denice, the lines between them blurring. It takes her a minute before she has the wherewithal to terminate Telepathy and prevent their panic attacks from feeding off each other and creating a vicious cycle.

Her hands feel clammy and she can feel her hair sticking to her cheeks from sweat.

Wherever she is, there she is. The Way of Flowers is the Way of connection, and it grieves every bond broken. But she can make new ones here. The Way of Flowers is the Way of growth, the Way of healing, the Way of the teenager leaving home and becoming an adult in their own right. She will be strong for Denice, and for herself, and they will strengthen each other.

You can make backlashes end quicker if you do something contrary to the Way you're suffering backlash from. With Marina, she always told people to lock her up in a room for several hours and isolate her until the backlash resolves – this being the opposite of connection. Paralyzing grief and terror also works, apparently.

Denice doesn't respond to the change immediately; not feeling Marina's emotions so directly helps, but she can still hear in her breath and heartbeat and the tension of her muscles how upset she is, on top of Denice's own panic. She does at least manage to loosen her grip on the woman a bit, when she notices her starting to calm down.

Now Sane Marina reviews her memories of the recent events.

Okay. It could have been worse. At least she didn't get arrested for chasing her coworker through the campus for half an hour like the first time she got backlash.

Her mind-voice seems much more composed now. There's this feeling like she's poised and ready for anything, as though she could walk across the wetlands in heels and come out without a speck on her pants.

:I deeply apologize for what just happened. If you feel like I am or have acted too personal with you and would like me to stop physically touching you or would prefer for me to leave, I can do that.: She clearly is still Very Concerned for her, but it's not visceral and overpowering like before. And she would prefer not to leave, but she will totally adhere to whatever Denice decides. 

:Healing someone with only one caster takes a lot of energy, and it caused me to go into backlash. Flowers backlash manifests as feelings of love and affection and a need to be with other people and be close to them. Which explains what I did before.: And a sensation of her dying of mortification and embarrassment but she clamps down on that. 

:The backlash has resolved itself now, and I'm back to my normal self.:

Oh, that's. That's worse. This is an adult and she's going to be an adult about things and everything will be awful forever. If Denice was smart she'd run but she can't seem to figure out how to move. She does at least manage to un-hug - it feels a little bit like throwing herself directly into a bonfire, giving up the physical contact, but the alternative is much worse.

She can pick up that that did not help things and it actually made things worse and that is bad.

She will not resist Denice shifting herself so that she's not touching her.

:Did I upset you? I'm sorry. A lot of people are put off by people being overly close to them, and I don't know if you feel similarly.: Embarrassment, and also grief. :I don't know how anything works here. It seems like I've been transported someplace very far away. I hope that you would be able to help me, but you have no obligations to me – you don't have to.:

There is no way whatsoever that she's going to be able to put thoughts into words right now, but she can sort of shove them at the telepathic bond without that and maybe it'll work: She doesn't mind what was happening before, in the sense that she's used to people being very cuddly and having strong emotions and that being a sign of them being the type of person she can trust. She doesn't mind what's happening now in the very different sense that objecting to what adults do never works and she's stopped trying. She's still thinking of Marina as someone she's going to be around and do joint problem-solving with, though there's a sense that that may be mostly because her feelings on the matter haven't caught up with themselves yet.

Shoving concepts at people is totally valid and the Telepathy spell will accommodate that! It's super convenient.

:I'm cuddly and have strong emotions but I have to tamp down on this because it makes people uncomfortable. Where I'm from.: she adds, because probably this different place has different cultural standards.

Oh no. Wow. Um. She wants to address that but she's not sure how to address it well. She does hope that Denice comes to see her as someone she can do joint problem-solving with, but you can't force trust.

She's not sure of what approach to take in this situation – she can see several that could work, but none that she feels would be the thing that Denice needs, so she stays silent, but still keeping Telepathy on so that she can respond.

Having strong emotions does make people uncomfortable but being the type of person who makes people uncomfortable rather than the type of person who is made uncomfortable is almost the same thing as being the type of person she can trust rather than the type of person she doesn't. Not entirely - there are definitely people on the 'makes people uncomfortable' side of the line who are actually bad - but the people who are uncomfortable with strong emotions - the adults - are the really dangerous ones, very uncomplicatedly so. (The distraction of thinking this through seems to help; she's not not panicking, but by the time she's gotten to the end of it, the edge is clearly off of it and she's started to calm down.)

- that's true where she was, at least; she's only been free for a few days and doesn't know how things work here yet, not really. But she expects the basic principles to mostly hold, even if the details are very different.

She's not sure what 'adults' means to Denice, because like, Marina is clearly an adult. Yes, her being a Flowers Practitioner makes her look younger, but she's still firmly an adult. 

:I'm not sure what you mean by adult? I'm an adult? In the sense of me being biologically fully grown and having passed the adulthood examination? Also, do you think the woman has gone away? I am willing to stay here for as long as you need, but I do disprefer sitting here behind the garbage container.:

Right, she was supposed to be keeping an eye on that. :Gone, yeah,: she sends, and stands to lead the way out from behind the dumpster and through the alley to the far side, where they can cross a brief strip of parking lot and then follow a deer trail into the woods between the stores and a housing development, navigating without looking around at all.

While she's walking, she'll shove the relevant observations at Marina: Adults on TV are different, but the adults she's known have almost all been very focused on making the children in their care comply with their demands, without any understanding of what's actually possible for them and with just enough care for their comfort or safety that the children almost never died of it. She's aware of the technical definition of an adult, but in practical terms 'hostile adversary with incredible power to hurt me' is really more what the concept means to her, and she's not inclined to put Marina-as-she-first-encountered-her in that category, it's very obviously wrong. (She has no comment regarding what categories Marina-as-she-is-now may or may not belong to.)

It's fascinating how Denice can just navigate like that without sight. Marina could never! She will let herself be led.

The backdrop of suppressed screaming horror coming from Marina has been steadily increasing as Denice transmits to her. 

:Why does this exist. You said you were from an institution? How has it not been burned down yet by some True? Or relevant equivalents here.: 'True' here meaning a follower of the Way of True Self, which is associated with freedom and individualism. :Did any of the children sue the institution after they passed the adulthood examination?:

The Way of Flowers is the way of fullness and abundance, so Marina doesn't notice Denice's omission. 

She's not sure what a True is. She's not personally planning on burning the place down because that'd kill all the kids, but she does want to go back and get them out, once she's ready. She doesn't know anything about adulthood examinations but it's pretty possible that they just never came up where she could hear about it; kids in the institution mostly get moved to adult institutions when they age out of that one. She hasn't heard of the institution being sued as a real thing, just something the staff worried about sometimes.

There's a picnic bench set up in the woods, with a slightly broader path leading away from it in the direction of the houses; Denice sits at it. It's dark enough to see a few stars, now, but there's enough ambient light from the houses for Marina to at least make out Denice's general shape in the dark.

This place must have an incredibly corrupt legal system if that place hasn't been sued to the stars and back for treating people like that. She's normally the type of person to try and resolve things formally and amicably, but it might not be a viable option here. She's not sure how much help she'd be, though – she has no combat magic save glamors, and glamors are the exact opposite thing you need to sneak people out. Glamors make people pay attention to you: the opposite of stealth.

:Where I come from, children take adulthood examinations that test you on math, language, law, and life skills, and when you pass you get the ability to sign contracts, have a will, get married, get an apprenticeship – basically all the rights adults have. Most people take it between 14 to 16, but you can take it as many times as you want until you pass. It's offered yearly. I don't know whether they do things like that here. If they don't speak Towan, not even one of the dialects, then this must be a place very far away indeed. My last foster child passed it at 15 and got an apprenticed to a builder soon after.:

Marina will sit next to Denice.

Denice scoots closer to lean on her slightly, without really thinking about it, and then catches herself and straightens back up.

:Don't think that's how things work, here. It sounds like I would have heard about it, on TV or from staff talking about their kids or kids parents talking about their other kids. If it's same as us it's, eighteen, adult, not eighteen, not adult yet.:

:Probably not the most important thing right now.:

18 is a little late, but not unusual. 

:Yes, it does sound different. I ought to learn more about this place. And learn the language. I can communicate via Telepathy, but you mentioned that this would out me as a cape, and capes risk being put in coercive institutions.:

:Where are you planning to sleep? Or, well, I suppose I could ask myself the same question.:

:No, being a cape is fine, most of the kids aren't and they didn't know I was. Bad if they find out I am and catch me, though, I think. For sleeping I'm not sure yet but probably best is to get into one of the houses that doesn't have people living in it, but safer to wait until people are mostly in bed so there's less chance they see us.:

Mm. She's not sure she likes the sound of that, but she doesn't say anything about it. Being caught breaking into someone's house would probably end up with her getting stabbed or dying if she did that where she was from.

:Hm. What would they do to try and catch you? Would they use violent force? Or would they try to do it legally and get police to arrest you? And on what legal standing? If it's just that you don't have a parent, I could be your parent. Or pretend to be, for the purposes of freeing you from having to worry about them. Living like this seems unsustainable.

It's quite tragic that I'm not a True, because otherwise I could cast The Old Must Die. It's a transformation ritual that can also change your appearance. It might — actually I shouldn't bother contemplating that, because I don't know how to cast it and it seems like your capes work differently from our Practitioners.

What if you traveled really far away? Would they get you then? Hm, no, you said you wanted to rescue the others, and I wouldn't promote a solution that prevented you from trying that: even though I am uncertain of the chance of success.

:What's your plan for getting the others out? I might be able to help, I'm not sure.: 

She thinks quickly, once she gets into the groove.

She doesn't trust that they wouldn't use violence, she sends wordlessly. :My plan is not to find out what they'll do if they find me. I do know the police are dangerous, they've been talking about me on the TV and said for people to call the police if they saw me. I don't know if you pretending to be my parent would work at all. I do want to get farther away but I need to figure out to do that - I think I can sneak onto a vehicle once I figure out where the good ones are. Being able to hear where people are and what they're looking at is good for sneaking around. I'll figure out how to get the others out once I've figured out how we can live out here, I don't think it's going to be fast and I don't think trying to do it close to the place is a good idea.:

Marina gets from Denice's thoughts the gists of what TV and automobiles are.

:Although I can't speak or read the language – what is it called, by the way? – I do have the advantage of never having been here before, so I don't have a bad reputation. Do you think people would react badly if I used Telepathy on them?: People do get startled if they're not used to it, but basically everyone knows that Opens and Flowers can do Telepathy. Of course, here it would be different.

:How close are we to the place? Do you have a shortlist of which places might be good to go to set up more permanently? I wonder if I could get a job or employment. I've worked as a Flowers ritualist, an economist, a teacher, a foster parent...you said that I would be a cape, right? Because of my powers? Do you think I could earn money that way? If I get one, I could get us a permanent place to stay.:

:I walked three nights to get here but I was too hungry to go very fast and cars are a lot faster than walking. I want to try to get to New York, that's the biggest city around here and I think it'll be easier to hide there.You can probably get a job doing cape things but I don't know how it'd work - letting people know you're a cape without using a secret identity is unusual but I've seen it on TV before, I don't think it's a problem. I'd still want to be really secret though. The language is English.:

:Secret identity? Do tell more about that. 

Ugh, I forgot that being a Flowers ritualist would mean I'd need assistants. Flowers rituals don't really work without them – it's why I suffered backlash when I healed you. I would have thought about teaching you, but you wouldn't be able to help me because you need to be in hiding. Probably I could find other people willing to assist me.

Yes, if I do get such a job, I will not talk about you or act in such a way that implies I know you, though I'd let you sleep in whatever house or apartment I find, or give you money if I need it.

Right, English. Do you think you could teach me English? I won't have time to get fluent here but knowing phrases is good. I can teach you Towan, but it's very unlikely to be useful to you.:

:I'm really bad at talking, that's a lot of why I was there. I can try to teach you, though. Secret identities are, like, you act like a normal person when you're doing normal things and then when you want to do cape things you wear a mask and use a different name so nobody knows who you are, that way if you have enemies they can't find you as easily to hurt you. Most capes fight each other a lot so that's a problem for them. It means normal people won't bother you about being a cape when you don't want them to, too, so some capes do it even if they don't fight.:

:Thank you! I appreciate any help that you might be able to give me.

That makes sense. I'm guessing it also comes with some sort of helm or mask, and another name? And maybe a costume. That seems very useful, though I'd have to figure out where to get the materials for such a project. Do capes work in teams? If we got a bunch of costume and mask materials, do you think you could just pose as your cape identity forever?

Yeah, I probably wouldn't do fighting. Flowers spells aren't conducive to that. It does have any combat spells – there is a spell that can cause growths to appear on someone, or give them cancer – but it's very expensive energetically, and besides, I don't know it. The most I can do is support.:

:Masks yeah, costumes yeah, names yeah, teams sometimes. Some capes work for the government and they get teams that way, other hero capes usually don't have teams I think, villain capes do sometimes but I don't know how commonly. I think it'd be dangerous to rescue kids in a costume I use other places but I guess I could have two.:

:Sorry, I don't know what you mean by 'hero' and 'villain'. The closest concepts coming to mind are 'sympathetic' vs 'unsympathetic', 'white market' vs 'gray market', and 'prosocial' vs 'antisocial'.

One plan might be for me to try and get a job as a cape in New York, so that we can get ourselves a place to stay and money to buy costumes and equipment with. That way, you can buy two costumes. One throwaway costume and persona to rescue the others, and then another one that you'll keep. I might do the same, if having me there would help.:

:Prosocial/antisocial, or maybe cop-type/criminal-type. If I do get the kids out and they figure out it was a cape they'll call me a villain but usually you hear about villains doing actually bad things, and heroes stop them or do things that help people.:

:That sounds like a pretty good plan but I think we should find out more about how cape jobs work, or jobs in general, I wasn't planning on having one and don't know much about them. I'm not sure how to do that but figuring out how to get into the library at night might work, they'll have computers.:

:Mm, I see. So it's more of a government-supported vs not plus an aesthetic difference? 

Indeed.: She likewise intuits the broad shape of what 'computers' are from Telepathy nuances. :Your world is so fantastically rich. I cannot begin to fathom the supply chains and industrial infrastructure you'd need to make such a thing! What percentage of New York's population engages in farming or ranching? Ah, you probably wouldn't know. But the computer might.

Do you want to go tonight, or tomorrow night? Are there libraries near here?:

:I don't think people farm or ranch at all in cities but I don't know much about it, yeah. I don't know where the library is, either, but I can check if it's nearby if you don't mind waiting while I do - we can go tonight if it's close, I'm not that tired. Heroes are... I think that's wrong but I don't know how to explain it better.:

:I don't mind waiting. And I'm not tired either. It's one of the perks of Flowers. I could also cast a vigor ritual or spell, but I think I'll hold off on doing any casting aside from Telepathy, at the risk of backlashing again.

That's fine. I think I could get an explanation from the library's computers. As an aside, I'm also illiterate in English. Once we do get in, I'll have to ask you to read the content for me. Not out loud – just think it in your mind, and send it to me.:

:Yeah, that works, I can read just fine. - they don't know I can read, if you somehow wind up having to talk to people about me please don't mention that. But I can. Anyway, I'll check for the library now.: And she settles onto her elbows and stops sending anything.

Marina will sit quietly and reflect on her plans so far. They seem pretty good. It seems to her that she could probably find some places that would benefit from Flowers rituals in the city, offering her services as a cape, even if she wasn't able to find an academic job – her papers and qualifications all left behind when she came here.

The farming rituals are a staple, but she won't find such work there. But she could work at a doctor's office or at a hospital, casting healing rituals. She'll probably have to demonstrate, but if she demonstrates it on a small cut, she won't risk backlash even though she's alone. And she knows a bunch of other healing associated rituals – she can do Sow the Seed for fertility, for one.

She could work as a psychotherapist...but she wouldn't have a reputation to stand on to work that. And it needs capital investment in the form of her own clinic.

She wants to see if there's some sort of guild or association for capes? Probably such a place would also coordinate job listings that she could take, and which she could advertise at. They'll likely take a cut out of her earnings, but it will be quick, which means she can get a place and materials for her and Denice quicker. And will let her acquire a reputation, at which point she could start her own firm without needing to use its services.

Belatedly, she realizes that she's kind of adopted Denice as her foster child, emotionally speaking. 

:Found it,: Denice reports after some minutes, :just need to figure out how to get there.: She pushes across a sense of its location, about four miles away as the crow flies.

:Okay, I see a path,: she adds after another few minutes.

:Alright, let's go.: Four miles is a bit of a walk, but the Way of Flowers is the way of vigor. She'll be fine walking that far.

Denice sets an easy pace, anyway, leading them through the housing development and out onto a walking path that parallels a little-used road, then through a park and down a couple more house-lined back roads before cutting through another patch of woods to come out at the library. She's very alert throughout the trip, occasionally hustling Marina off the road to wait for a car to go by or suddenly detouring or holding her back with reports of 'people there'.

The library is clearly closed when they get there, but she spends a minute fiddling with the door with something taken from her pocket, and it opens for her; she then spends a few seconds contemplating the bank of lightswitches by the door before picking one that turns on the lights over the shelves in the far end of the building. :Don't want it too obvious that someone's here,: she explains.

Marina notices the shift in Denice's body language as she transitions to relying virtually entirely on her hearing to navigate, and it's fascinating. She would trade a season's salary for just a minute experiencing what Denice does. What depth and acuity of sensation! She has never seen anything like it.

She's kind of Concerned at how Denice is so good at picking locks, especially given that locks here seem to be more elaborate, but she suppresses this concern. Picking locks is inherently unproblematic – it just has problematic correlates.

:I see. I understand.: She wants to ask Additional Questions about the operation of the artificial lights, but she understands that this is not really the time for it.

:I've never actually used a computer before, if we can't figure it out we can stay nearby and I can listen to how they do it in the morning. Do you want to try that first, or the books?:

:I'm more familiar with books, of course, but I'm also illiterate in English. It seems like the information we want to get most urgently – opportunities for jobs for capes in New York, and how to get them – needs to be timely. And computers are for very fast communications, right? So it seems that computers would be better?

The information about infrastructure and supply chains that I want is more likely to be found in books, since that doesn't change on the order of days, but also it is not urgently relevant to our situation, I think. So we can put that as a stretch goal.:

She is also kind of boggling at how many books there are here, but they also probably have better printing presses. And also haven't experienced a major world war recently that destroyed a bunch of libraries and scriptoria. 

:I think that's right. Or there are newspapers for fast stuff that's nearby or big, they have job listings but I don't know if they have cape ones. We have plenty of time tonight, anyway, we can look at whatever. I'll see if they have instructions for the computers.: She goes to start looking through the papers posted behind the desk and then in the back office, very methodically.

It is so sad that she cannot help!! Being illiterate sucks!!

She suppresses the urge to hum, because they are being Stealthy now.

It takes a bit, but eventually the bank of computers lights up and begins to boot, each playing a jaunty little tune to mark that it's ready to use, and Denice comes out to enter the password to unlock one.

She seems a bit stymied, after that, peering at the screen. :I don't know which of these is the one we want,: she says of the displayed icons. :I guess I can just try them, there's not that many.:

The first few are baffling, but after enough tries she finds the internet browser, conveniently set up with a search bar on its starting page, and enters 'cape jobs'. None of the results that come up are obviously what they want; when she clicks the first link anyway it leads to a news story about rogues - capes who are neither heroes nor villains - using their powers in their jobs, presenting this as something unusual but approved of. :Do you want to read the rest of it?: she asks, after relaying the first couple paragraphs.

:Yes please. From what I've gathered, 'heroes' are more legible (in the governmental sense – which she helpfully packages up for Denice to be able to understand), and villains less so, but still legible, since it seems that the government actively discourages them. For the sake of both of us – me, because I know nothing about this world and also don't know the language, and you, who would prefer not to be known or legible so that the institution can't get you – it seems better to be a rogue?

If being a rogue is societally and legally acceptable but means that we don't have to operate within a formal system, it seems like the best way to go. We, or at least, I, can transition in the future to operating more legibly, but it's harder to transition back, because then the systems will know things about you.:

:That's not really it - you're right about me not wanting to be legible but that's not the real difference. Heroes are good guys, they help people or think they do or at least other people think they do, and villains are bad guys, they hurt people or at least do things that people think hurt people, and rogues just do normal things. When I get the other kids out they're going to call me a villain because they think the kids being there is good and taking them away is bad. Having a job is a normal thing so if you do that and not hero or villain things with your powers they'll say you're a rogue - they might say you're a hero if you heal people, even if it's for money, they're a little weird about doctors.:

:I'd say I'm a lot more proactive and altruistic than the norm where I come from. So I suppose I'd be a hero under that ontology, but I like, don't really think that my proactiveness and altruism as being core to my personality? 

It's very sad that they'll think of you as a villain after that.

Things I'd want to know: what ways do rogues advertise themselves? Your cape powers seem much more varied than our Ways, so presumably there's some sort of process where you have to demonstrate your power so that you can get job offers? Oh, and are there any hero institutions, and if so, how do you join one? That wouldn't be my first choice but it seems useful to know.:

:They've been wrong about me for my whole life, it'd be weird if they stopped now.: Which hurts, but, well. Nothing to be done about it.

:For heroes there's the PRT - that's the government hero thing - and then some other groups, or sometimes they work alone. The PRT you can just go and talk to them and join, they have ads on the TV about it sometimes. For the other groups I don't know - they are groups, they have to get people somehow, but I don't know how it works. I haven't heard of rogue groups being a thing but I don't hear about rogues very much, maybe they are and the news just doesn't talk about it.:

:I think if you just looked for a job that your powers are good for and told them about the powers at the interview that might work? You can show them if they want to see, right?:

She wants to hug her but this is not the time.

:Do you think it would be a good idea for me to try joining the PRT? It seems like they would pay well, but they might pry into my past, which would be...hard to explain. Do you think you could look up whether they have publications online about the joining process?

Maybe? About one in ten people in my world are Practitioners, and people who follow the same Way operate similarly. So it's both common and legible enough that people will work with a Practitioner just like that. But capes seem to have more ad-hoc powers. If I try to get a job at a doctor's office with my healing powers, they might not take me because they have no idea how my practice would interact with their medicine. For us, we have lots of literature about the interactions of practical medicine and mundane medicine, but they wouldn't have that here.

I want to be able to credibly signal that I'm a cape, and what my powers are – that I'm not deluded – and that I'm capable of making deals and doing work on time.:

:There is a thing where capes just appear sometimes. Usually weird-looking ones but I think not always. I don't really know much about the PRT, I can't join them so I wasn't really paying attention to them. For getting jobs I don't think they ask about that stuff mostly? They didn't when they were hiring staff at the place, just if they had reliable transportation. ...also they wanted paperwork, I don't know how you get the paperwork. ID and a social security card and stuff.:

She opens up a new window to search for 'how to join the PRT'.

:We have that too! In the form of Geniuses, which awaken spontaneously. But for them, they awaken in one of the Ways, so we already know to a certain extent what they can do.

Hm. I don't know how to operate a car, if it requires complex operation. Is that what it means? Or is it like, a euphemism for whether or not you're crippled and can't walk? Yeah, the paperwork will be an issue...I wasn't able to bring any of it with me, not that they'll accept it here.

I suppose I could try applying for a job and casting a glamor (she packages up the concept of it: a spell that makes people pay attention to you, sometimes in specific ways, that can change how they perceive and treat you) on myself so that I get it. But that's quite ugly and tantamount to fraud, and so I'd prefer not to resort to that.:

:I mean appearing like they didn't exist before, not that they just didn't have powers. Cars don't sound that hard to drive but they're complicated machines, they break sometimes especially if you have a bad one. At least where I was, everybody drives to work, so if your car breaks down you can't come.:

She reads through the PRT website that her search has turned up: They're willing to let applying capes keep their mundane identities secret, most importantly, and offer a number of perks aimed at helping a new cape get set up as a hero and learn how to best use their powers. They also mention that they don't require their capes to patrol, if they have powers better suited to behind-the-scenes work. There's an email address and phone number to contact them for further information or to do a preliminary interview.

:Oh, yeah, we don't have that. Geniuses have existences prior to acquiring their powers.

Huh. Perhaps things are farther away here? Where I'm from you just walk, or get a horse or carriage. Though maybe if you have cars, then you have less tolerance for walking.:

She thinks on the PRT information for a bit.

:Do you think the PRT are trustworthy? Do you think they'll keep to their word? Hm, I suppose we could try looking up information on capes the PRT has employed, to see if any one of them has had their mundane identities leaked. 

Yeah, I'm not sure I'd be good on a patrol.:

She gets the concepts of 'email' and 'phone' from Denice's Telepathy nuances – it is such a useful spell :Do you think I should try contacting them now? Or, not now now, but soon, before we reach New York. I won't do it if you think it's a bad idea.:

:Almost nobody has horses here. The only ones I know about are the police in New York have some. Cars are good for going places, though, a car could go the distance we walked to get here in a few minutes.:

:I don't know much about the PRT, it wouldn't be safe for me to try to join them so I haven't been paying attention to them like that. I think... sometimes people do leave them, so you can, but it's not common, so their capes are probably okay with being there. I can try to find out about them keeping peoples' identities secret.: She brings up a third window to do so, and this one covers the browser icon. :I can't talk well enough to use the phone but I can try to figure out how to do email.:

She wants to know how much a car costs because she kind of wants one now, but that is not the topic.

:Mm, thank you. I would want the option of leaving, indeed. And yes, email sounds better. Both because I don't know the language and so cannot speak it, save Telepathy, which I highly doubt would work over the phone, but also because it would give us a record of the conversation in text.

Not knowing the language seems terribly problematic. I suppose...are there cases of capes that lose literacy or the ability to speak after acquiring their powers? Maybe I could pretend to be that, and then 're'gain the ability later?:

:I haven't heard of anything like that. We could check. - there's paper and pencils over there if you want to start making a list of what we need to do, just be careful to bring it with you when we go.:

Her most recent search brings her to a forum thread of people discussing cape unmaskings; PRT capes aren't immune, but the PRT itself is careful about not leaking them, it just happens sometimes that a villain will find out who they are despite whatever precautions are in place. :Which isn't surprising, I can tell people apart by sound and a costume won't stop me.:

She will take Denice up on her suggestion and start writing things down, in cursive Towan script.

:That's true. It's likely that there are other people with sensory powers that could unmask people. But there's an incentive for people to coordinate and never unmask each other, like a war crimes treaty. Though the issue with that is that only the PRT is unified, and will police its members from unmasking villains. I don't think villains would have such a structure.

I'm personally not very concerned about being unmasked. I don't have a civilian life, here anyway, and I only care about it insofar as it might affect you.

I think...it might be good to email the PRT? Would emailing them expose our position? 

Aside from that, I want to also get language learning materials. Do you know how this library is laid out, or whether it has materials to learn English with? Even if you can't teach me how to speak, learning how to read would be immensely useful.:

:I don't know much about how email works, but even if it tells them we were here I don't think that's too dangerous. I'll hear it if they're waiting for us when we come back to see what they said, and then we know not to work with them.:

:Kids' books are over there, little kids' books are made for learning to read with.:

:That's true! Your hearing is so good!: A burst of affection and pride.

:I'll try looking for kids' books while you figure out email. Later, do you think you could help me find grammar or linguistics books? It might be helpful for me, because I did research in that a while ago. So they might be more useful to me.:

She'll still be able to keep within Telepathy range so long as they're within several meters or so, but after that it will be too far for Marina to sustain for any significant length of time.

She's trying to look for kids' books that cover jobs, infrastructure, or government. Are there such books? She's expecting them to be illustrated.

She can find books on architecture - this world has skyscrapers! - and construction vehicles and people in various unifom-ish outfits doing various things, some of which involve using various tools or interacting with casually-dressed people in strange settings and some of which involve writing or sitting in groups with similarly-dressed people in opulent surroundings.

Skyscrapers! Definitely will take that one. She'll also takes a few each of the 'using tools' books and the 'sitting in groups' books, and returns to Denice.

:There we go. I took a bunch of books. This will be my first time learning a language after awakening as a Flower. I hope Telepathy and my other spells will let me learn quicker.:

She'll place the books beside the paper she's writing down on.

:I'm still working on the email, I think I'll figure it out tonight but it's complicated and I've never done this before. I can take a break and read one of those to you if you want.:

:Yes please! Thank you for all your effort helping me. I hope that I'll be able to help you in the same way.:

She'll gesture for one of the 'sitting in opulent place' books.

:I'll maintain Telepathy so that I can get the meanings of the words from you. Will you read aloud or silently?:

:Silently, I really almost can't talk at all. They do have CDs and some of those might be people reading books if you want that.:

:That's okay! I think I might do that, though even if I only get some literacy, that is already very good. At least then I can read and write. Is your script at least phonetic? That is to say, can you glean the pronunciations of words based on how they're written, and vice versa?:

:Uh, sort of. Words are made of letters and the letters usually have mostly the same sounds, but only usually and mostly.:

:Oh, that sounds like the state Towan is in. We've been wanting to do spelling reform to accommodate changes in how the language has been spoken since the War. I can deal with it.:

Marina will focus on maintaining Telepathy to associate word-meaning pairs between what's on the page and what Denice is sending her.

The book she's picked describes the basics of how the United States' federal government works, with a two-part legislative branch selected by the states to make laws, the president in charge of the executive branch and the military to enforce laws and conduct wars, and the president-appointed members of the judicial branch to determine the details of how laws are enforced, by hearing court cases. There's a fair amount of focus on the fact that most of these people are elected and all of them are meant to serve the country.

She is learning!

:We also have a democracy! We can vote on laws and who's elected to the executive and judiciary. Though – can capes run for office? Practitioners can't run for office or hold government positions with executive power, but they can vote.:

:I haven't heard of that happening but I'm not sure how you'd stop them, if you don't know who's a cape most of the time.:

:Ah, that's true. For us you can verify whether or not someone's awakened, and in what, using effects. But I suppose there's no way to detect whether someone like you was a cape, because your power is passive. Unless there are cape powers that can detect other powers.:

:Are you allowed to check out books from the library? Could I come here tomorrow, during the day, and check out these books? I might also be able to check out books for you.:

:You can check books out but they might want paperwork from you before they let you - I can check that too, write it down so we don't forget.:

She'll write it down!

:Thinking on it, it seems like a good idea to read more books now, and then try to figure out emailing the PRT later? Because then, at least, if we do end up having to run away because they figured out where we are and are coming, we'd've already have read the books.:

:If they come for us I'm going to want to leave the whole town, and I think there'll be another library wherever we go, I don't think they're rare at all. But sure.:

The next book is about how skyscrapers are built; the one after that is about the scientific method, following a be-lab-coated scientist as he runs an experiment to determine how much water makes kidney beans sprout the best. The one after that is a biography of Galileo, then one about the founding of the country and how its constitution was written. Denice doesn't offer commentary on the contents of the books, for the most part, but does point out the more egregious cases of English's frankenlanguage nature.

By the time she's done with the last book, she wants something to drink; conveniently there's a water fountain against the wall. :There's snacks in the office if you're hungry,: she adds.

She is not listening, but she is learning!

Marina is very familiar with the scientific method and is glad, though unsurprised, that this world has it too. 

Huh. She has no idea what religion is, or why they would want to suppress information like that. She's not sure whether she wants to open that topic.

It sounds like the founding of the Federation, in a way. Though the impetus for creating the Federation differs: it became a thing because people wanted to avoid another world war between the six Ways – at the time, individual countries usually privileged one way and marginalized the others, which caused deep cultural differences that eventually came to a head.

English's unoptimizedness is frustrating, but not surprising. She managed to learn Topona's complex compounding system – she can learn weird English spelling.

She sends images of written text rather than pure concepts this time, to try out the language.

:"I understand. I am not hungry. But, I want drink water.":

She really is not hungry, though a part of why she said that is because she kind of is still repulsed at the idea of just...taking things like that. She doesn't want to steal, despite the circumstances. But it's possible that she'll have to in future. Future Marina can deal with that. Sorry Future Marina.

Marina is also welcome to the water fountain, then; Denice will show her where to push to get water out of it. And then she has an idea for working on the email project: having to switch back and forth between the instructions for setting up an account that she found and the actual page has been slowing her down considerably, but if she can figure out how to print the instructions she won't have that problem any more. It turns out to be fairly easy to print the instructions and she tells Marina she thinks it'll be pretty quick from here, if she wants to start thinking about what she wants the email to say.

Piped water is great! She smiles brightly.

This part will be complicated so she goes back to sending concepts rather than images of printed text.

:I keep being amazed by your technology. A printing press that can put out pages like that that fast! And with such quality, too. Anyway, the email.

I'm conflicted on how forthright I want to be. Explaining the whole...situation about how I'm from another world seems nightmarish, and also seems like they'll reject me outright for being deluded. But not being forthright risks exposing myself and then having to be investigated more deeply than if I had just talked about everything from the start. Not to mention the reputational costs.

I'm thinking...I should frame things in their native ontology – that I am a cape with innate powers, which is true, but not entirely accurate – rather than saying 'I'm a Flowers Practitioner and I can do these spells and rituals'. And avoid outright lying, but do some misdirection or tactical omission. I think they'll still be interested even if I just say that I can do healing that can scale, and perhaps telepathy, but not mention my other abilities like fertilizing plants or boosting fertility or improving vigor and whatnot. So...

This would be a good time to pick a cape name, I think. I'm not sure. 'Marina' doesn't mean anything – it's just sounds. I named myself after Marina, a famous historical mathematician from my province.

'Hiupio' means 'quartz'. Perhaps I can use that? 'Inse' is 'jade', and 'suimche' means 'secretary'. Probably not the last one. It's wholly unrelated to my powers or concept. I could also name myself 'Flower'. Maybe something that combines the two...

Lotus-sapphire. Do you have it here? It's sapphire that's orange or pink.:

She sends an image of padparadscha sapphire.

She also sends her initial draft for the letter, for Denice to comment on.

To: The Parahuman Response Team
From: Padparadscha

I am a relatively new cape*, and I have read that you are open for capes to apply to join and receive guidance on how best to use their powers. I have also read that you do not require your capes to patrol if their powers are unsuited to it. I would like to correspond with your organization what would be required of me if I join, and what the joining process is like, and mechanisms for each of us to be able to signal to each other our trustworthiness and good-faith.

My power is healing. Alone, I can heal minor cuts and bruises. However, my power can scale. My power is mediated by dancing, and to a lesser extent, singing. I can have other people – non-capes – join in with me in the dancing and singing, including the person or people being treated, and this makes my healing more powerful. The energy I can use exhibits polynomial growth with respect to the number of people participating**. People with more severe injuries take up more of the energy. With several assistants, I can form a circle and treat many people inside the circle.

Some things are easier to do with my powers compared to others. Healing skin injuries and bruises is easiest. I can also cause some parts of the body to regenerate, such as restoring skin lost due to burns, but I cannot restore, for example, a lost finger. Some diseases are treated by my power, but some are unaffected, or become worse. I can also help people recover from blood loss, or make healing from things like broken bones faster – but the bone must be set properly first, or it will heal wrong.

I think that my powers have the potential to be very useful and benefit a lot of people, and I think that you, the PRT, are best placed to put me where I could benefit the most people.

* It's not a lie, not technically. She's a veteran practitioner, but a new cape.

** You can get exponential growth if you use fellow Flowers practitioners, but she's the only one in this world, she thinks.

:I don't know much about gems. That one's pretty, though. And 'marina' is a word in english, for a place with boats - 'marine' is things to do with water in general, like 'marine life' is fish and stuff.:

:I think it'd be weird for a new cape to know that much about how their power worked. And it's weird to want to join the PRT if you want to heal people, they're not really for that, I think.:

:Thank you! It's one of my favorites. We can try looking up its name later. If the name doesn't sound so nice in English, I'll think of some other gems. Maybe...rose quartz. Or rosaline.: She attaches pictures of both.

:I see! That's a great meaning – sadly unusable for a cape name for multiple reasons, though.

That's true. I should pare it down a bit. I think removing a lot of the lower sections, but keeping in the fact that my power grows stronger the more people are dancing with me.

It does seem that cape powers are quite narrow, mostly. More akin to our Geniuses rather than Scholars. So it wouldn't be unusual if healing and telepathy were my only powers.

Really? What does their mission statement or similar say? Are they explicitly like, martial only? Even if they were a military organization, you still need support staff like medics. Flowers ritualists see a lot of use in war, because we do healing, and our healing scales. Hm, do you think you can look up capes that have healing or medicinal or regenerative powers that work on others?:

:I think they'd take you, as a healer, but they'd just have you healing their guys, which isn't 'lots of people'. Anyway, I'll look.:

There's a wiki about capes, it turns out; it calls them parahumans. According to it, healing is rare, found mostly in tinkers (:people who make machines and stuff:), and highly sought-after, especially for endbringer attacks.

:Mm. That's true. I should probably ask whether I'll be contractually obligated only to heal their people or whether I can heal other people too on the side, or some other more complicated arrangement. If they wouldn't allow me to heal other people, then that is a major con for working with them. Does the PRT have any healers? Or are the healers all rogues?:

Marina is kind of baffled that tinkers – which she's rounding off to Fires – are the ones that specialize in healing. But she has to remind herself to discard her old ontology and adopt this one.

:What is an endbringer attack.:

:I don't know what capes the PRT has. Endbringers are huge monsters, there's three of them, every once in a while they attack cities and all the capes go to fight them - not all the capes, I'm not going to, but lots and lots. The water one sank a whole big island last year and there's an earth one and a flying one, the flying one makes people - not normal crazy but kind of crazy, if they hear her sing too much.:

:Oh. So your world has been suffering from something worse than the storms after the war this whole time.

I – definitely want to see if I can help, though that is not the main priority right now. Most likely I'll work in the back healing people and not actually do any fighting, given that I'm useless at that. And I assume that I could earn money doing it, but I'm not sure. I would want to make enough money to support the both of us.

Relatedly, for my letter, if I pose as a new cape, I'll need to talk about how I got my powers. How do capes get their powers? I'll also need to think about what story to say about my life before then, but that I might be able to weasel out of elaborating on, or piece together a story mimicking my actual life story.:

:I know how I got my powers but I don't know if it's the same for everybody, I'll check.:

:Yeah, it's when something really bad happens, and you get powers that have to do with the thing that happened and, like, what you wanted then. They call the bad thing your trigger.:

:Ah, hm. My 'trigger event', summarized briefly, was me contemplating economics during a grocery store trip. Not very traumatizing.

I think...maybe I can say that someone really close to me died. Maybe they were injured, and I didn't know how to treat them, and that's when I triggered. But it was already too late to save them then. That probably works, so long as I fill it the details.

Before I ask you to write the letter, could you try looking up gem names on the computer? Actually, now that we're here, have you thought about what your cape name would be?:

She can look up gems, sure, and she'll quickly be able to bring up a whole list of gem names to print. :I've been thinking of myself as Rescue, for getting the kids out. If other people are going to know about me I want to use a different one for that.:

After several minutes of checking, she eventually identifies 'padparadscha' as a variant of sapphires.

:Found it! Rescue sounds good. If I do end up helping you get the other kids out, I should think of an alternate persona too.:

:Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.:

:I think I just need a couple more minutes to get the email account set up and then we can send the message, if you're ready.:

:Ready!:

To: The Parahuman Response Team
From: Padparadscha

I am a new cape, and I have read that you are open for capes to apply to join and receive guidance on how best to use their powers.

My power is healing. Alone, I can heal minor cuts and bruises. However, my power can scale. My power is mediated by dancing, and to a lesser extent, singing. I can have other people – non-capes – join in with me in the dancing and singing, including the person or people being treated, and this makes my healing more powerful, letting it heal more people or heal more severe injuries. I believe it has the potential to treat diseases or hasten healing of things like bones too.

I think that my powers could be very useful to you, and could be very useful to people in general. I am very well suited as filling a backline support role, patching up people who have been hurt in the field.

I am considering joining the PRT, but would like more information before I apply.

If I join the PRT, will you require that I heal exclusively the people that you direct me to heal, or will I be allowed to heal unrelated people too?

Is it possible to join the PRT as a contractor? What are the mechanisms for quitting or retiring?

What is the joining process like? Will I have to produce documents or answer questions or pass tests, aside from demonstrating my power?

I would like for us to set up mechanisms by which we can exchange credible signals about our trustworthiness and good-faith.

That looks fine to Denice, though she does explain that she doesn't know how people usually speak to each other in this kind of letter; she sends it.

:What else did you want to do tonight? I think it might be best to look for more things to print, so we can bring them with us. Stuff about capes, and maybe stuff about how to get paperwork and food and stuff if I can find anything like that.:

She sends that she doesn't know how people here talk either, and she just used the way she talked back in Kosofo. Surely letter styles can't be that different.

:Yes, I think I'd want to print out more stuff about capes so that I can talk to the PRT without looking totally ignorant. Maybe more stuff from the Parahumans Wiki? Oh, and maybe there is stuff that you can print like exercise worksheets for me to do to learn English.: It seems better than just stealing books from the library, but she supposes if you have printing presses that good, then you're stealing less value. Oh stars, she's justifying stealing to herself. What has her world come to. She is being a very, very bad economist.

:You're right. We need to think about how to get paperwork for both of us. And food, yes. I might...if worst comes to worst, I might do glamors to convince people to donate food or money to us. Or more specifically, me, since I don't think you want that attention, and then I can share half of what I get with you.:

:Those sound like good ideas, yeah.: She gets the printing started.

:Even if we find instructions for how to get food, it's probably going to take a few days, and I really don't want to go that long without eating.: Frankly she'd really like to eat tonight, but she's picked up on Marina's discomfort with the idea of stealing food and doesn't want to upset her. Maybe she can grab some of those snacks from the back office without her noticing.

:That's true. I realize now that my proposal for 'begging with glamors' is stymied by the fact that I don't speak English.:

She doesn't pick up on Denice's plan to sneak by Marina and eat the snacks, but she does know that Denice would be hungry too, and obviously she would want to eat the food that's nearby.

:I think we should eat the snacks in the back office now, and later, when we've figured out the money situation, I can make a donation.: She still feels deeply uncomfortable with it, but she like, also doesn't want to die. And this would at least make it a neutral or positive value trade...even though she cannot really call it a trade because it wasn't consented to.

:Yeah, that works.:

Various drawers in the office turn out to contain half a pack of cookies, most of a bag of low-salt potato chips, and a nearly-full package of beef jerky, and there's a jug of milk in the staff refrigerator and a coffee-making setup nearby.

She will offer to let Denice pick out which things she wants to eat first, and Marina will take what she doesn't want to eat. The thing that she definitely does want to have some of is the milk, though. She is partial to it.

She does not recognize the drip coffee maker as a food appliance and ignores it.

Denice is most interested in the beef jerky and cookies, and also wants a glass of milk. She makes sure to leave some of all of them for Marina, though.

:Did you want to try a CD while we're here? The CD player is over there.:

She is grateful! Denice needs the food much more than Marina; she's still growing, and she doesn't have a passive Flowers effect that would allay temporary starvation.

:Yes! It plays audio, right? Does it have spoken versions of books? Do you think you could help me find a CD reading a book aloud, and then the book in its paper form. That way I can listen to how it's spoken, while also seeing the spelling. And then I could get the meaning from you via Telepathy. It would be the ideal learning environment, indeed.:

:I don't know how to find specific books here yet but I can go see if they have books on CD at all.:

And a few minutes later: :They have books on CD, yeah. What kind do you like?:

:Thank you for looking for me. If you had asked me this question back at home, I would have asked about fiction. But...given the circumstances, I probably want to learn about this world while learning about language at the same time. I'm thinking...books about law, or parahumans, or technology, or computers. Or, actually, since you're already doing me a favor by mentally translating and looking for things for me, you should pick what you think is good or interesting, since it will all be good as language practice for me.:

:I'll see what they have.:

She comes back with a history of the protectorate, the parahuman branch of the PRT. After the first chapter, when they've finished eating and cleaning up after themselves, she takes the CD player over to the computers so that she can continue queuing up printouts while they listen.

Enhancing memory is resonant with Perfect, not Flowers. But there's a way to cheat it a little. You can use Flowers effects to heighten the emotional salience of memories, and thus make them easier for you to remember. The spell's not in the Federation Spellbook – she came up with it independently – but she calls it Heighten Salience. It costs little energy, but it's a finicky spell to control. Fortunately, Marina has very good Control.

She casts it, and now the history of the Protectorate is so sparkly and the meanings of words like 'president' or 'funding' are so sparkly and now they'll be much easier to hold in her mind. She still does try to write down as much as she can, though, carefully writing the English text of words alongside their pronunciation in phonetic notation – she's so glad she learned it, even if it's her world's version – and their definitions, which she will write in Towan.

She'll try actually speaking English now. 

"Thank you help me learn." She's surprisingly good at saying the consonant clusters, given that her native language only has nasal plus consonant clusters, but she's having trouble with the vowels. English has way more than six vowels. 

:You're welcome.: And she can explain what Marina needs to change about how she's moving her mouth to make the more difficult vowels.

"Thank you!" she says, with better pronunciation this time.

"Maybe we sleep soon? I want sleep soon." Despite talking out loud, she continues to have Telepathy open both so that she can transmit her intended meaning, and so that Denice can reply. 

"Not now now, but soon. I am..." :you don't have names for the Ways. What to call them...'flower' is a common metaphor for Flowers. What's the word for that in English?:

"I need less sleep. You is growing. You is need more sleep. Maybe you want sleep first? I do not sleep. Then, I sleep, and you do not sleep." She transmits the concept of taking watches at a camp.

"Flower," she pronounces carefully, :is flower. We shouldn't sleep here, I don't know when the librarians come in the morning or what parts of the building they check. But I'm not tired yet, we have time to walk to an empty house, and then we can both sleep - I'll hear it and wake up if anyone gets too close.:

"Flower. Flower. Flower," she repeats carefully.

"Oh! I not know you hear even sleep. I do not do that. I not hear even sleep. Yes, we walk to no person house later at time tired."

"Maybe good to read computer...place find food. Um. Place find food no price. Food...give everyone..." Okay this is a concept that's too complex to explain with her level of English vocabulary: she sends the concept of a soup kitchen or a food bank. Back in the day, Flowers Practitioners would set up these things, in the days before the war where there was less state capacity and Practitioners did more government-type things. She's wondering whether America – she has figured out that this is where they are – has something like that. Even if Denice can't ask for it, Marina could, and she could share what she got with her.

:If I say your name you'll wake up, right? Most people will wake up if they hear something important in their sleep, I just know a little better what things are important.:

:I don't know what a place like that would be called, but I can try to look it up.: She's a little more confident with the search engine now, and is soon looking at a link claiming to lead to a map to the nearest food bank. :I don't know how it knows which one is near us, and that seems dangerous. I guess it might already be too late if it's a problem.:

"Yes. But also, shake my..." and she gestures to her arm, "so I quickly wake. Wow! Your hearing do thinking too!"

Oh. Yes, that does seem concerning. She transitions back to Telepathy so she can speak without pausing to think.

:Do you hear anyone coming? What's your range? What might be good to do is...print out maps leading to New York now, with other food banks listed. I can try going to the second nearest, with you standing at the edge of your range, listening. No one here knows me, but if things go wrong, you have warning and you can run. And then we can take the notes and papers and go to an empty house now.:

:Nobody's nearby or coming here now, I would have said - remember how far I had to listen to hear the library? I can hear buildings a little farther than that - not that and a half, but somewhere between that and that-and-a-half - and loud things like cars maybe three times that far, if I'm paying attention to it. If I'm doing other things my range is like half or a third depending on how distracted I am but it's still pretty far. So we're safe right now, I'm just worried about them figuring out we were here and what our plans are.:

:I haven't searched for anything to do with New York yet, I think what we want to do is not do that, stay around here for a few days to see if they try to catch us here or at the food bank, and then if they don't do anything like that we know it's not too dangerous and we can look up how to go to New York. It'll make things a lot harder if we can't use computers and I don't want to give them up if we're just guessing it's dangerous.:

:Oh, so buildings five miles away, and loud things around up to fifteen miles away. But when you're distracted, only around two miles. Did I get that right?

That seems wise. We can stay here for now, and I can try going to the library myself or the food bank to see if they pay special attention to me. Maybe the food bank tomorrow, so I can try to get us a bunch of food, and then the library later or the next day. I'll cast a vigor spell beforehand so that I can run away if I need to. It makes me faster and gives me better endurance. You should stay at the edge of your range and listen closely, and run away if you hear anything bad's happening.

You're right! Computers are really good and useful!:

:Yeah, that all sounds good. Okay, I'll print the food bank map. Anything else before we go?:

Marina will put back the books and the CD and other sundries back to where she got them, or at least near them. She'd prefer that they leave as small a trace as possible. She'll gather up her notes and take a pen – it is such a good pen with an in-built ink reservoir!

"I can go now. I follow you."

Denice gathers up the printouts and waffles over taking a tote bag from the stack under the desk before settling on yes. :I don't want to accidentally drop any of our papers anywhere, some of them are important and it feels too much like leaving them a clue.: And then they can go, turning off the lights and locking the door behind themselves, and head back through the woods and along a few roads to the house Denice has picked out. She gets noticeably tenser as they go - it's getting closer to daytime and a few early risers are up and about and could see them - but they make it there without incident and before the sun has had time to do more than gently brighten one side of the sky.

Denice picks the lock on the back door, revealing an empty and unfurnished house. She suggests that they sleep next to the door they came in by, for the best chance of getting out without being seen if someone comes in through the front door.

That's very valid! She was thinking the same thing too.

Marina will follow. Denice's power continues to be super useful and good.

"That is smart." She really wishes she had antiglamor spells...but she does not. And she won't be able to rederive them – antiglamors are Tranquil.

She will lie down on the floor sleep. It's terribly uncomfortable, but she's tired. She will hold Denice in her arms, if she lets her.

It's not comfortable in the slightest but it does beat 'behind a dumpster' or 'under a bush', so Denice isn't complaining. She has no objections to snuggling up, either, though in such close quarters Marina might end up noticing that she has nightmares.

Poor girl. She will hold Denice tighter and stroke her side. Will that comfort her? She'll stop if she detects that it's making her more fearful.

A Tranquil ritual can banish nightmares, or more specifically, all dreams. She wonders whether it's possible to derive a Flowers ritual to banish nightmares. It would have to be a different mechanism. Probably one that fills your sleep with pleasant dreams such that there is no space for nightmares. It would be a very fun Flowers research project!

She falls asleep again contemplating how she might have approached it.

Petting her wakes her immediately, with a quiet gasp and tense stillness while she tries to figure out what's going on.

:I'm sorry. Did I wake you up? You were having nightmares and I was trying to soothe you.:

:Oh. That happens. Please don't touch me about it.:

:I apologize. I will no longer do it.:

She will return her arms to their previous positions.

She's too unsettled to go back to sleep immediately, but the cuddling is nice and she can listen to what the people in the nearby houses are up to, and eventually she drifts back off.

She wakes again with a start around midmorning, looking alarmed but not immediately inclined to bolt out the door.

Marina will stir, but not to full awareness – she was in the middle of a sleep cycle. Is something happening?

Denice murmurs something soothing and settles back down after a moment, so presumably not. (Someone's baby up the road pulled a pan out of a cupboard and the sound startled her, in fact.)

It seems that she's not going to be able to get back to sleep, though, so after a while of trying she pulls some of the printouts out of the tote bag, trying not to jostle Marina too much, and starts reading them.

Marina will be soothed, and will continue to sleep for another forty five minutes, after which she'll wake up in earnest.

:Good afternoon. Something that I should try doing, that I forgot to do yesterday, was try and see whether casting sensory wards would work here and be useful. Sensory wards, after being put down, let you sense things at that location as though you were there. You can attach any sense to a sensory ward, but sight and hearing are most common. The range is similar to yours – I can pick things up from my wards from up to ten miles away, but the acuity decreases the farther you go – but I have to place them there beforehand. Do you think it would be useful?

I have a permanent sensory ward on my house back in Kosofo so that I can check on things even when I'm out doing business.:

:That sounds really useful if it works with my hearing, yeah.:

:I can cast it on this house, but I'll need foci for it to work. Something spherical and smooth is best. And organic. Rocks or glass are inorganic and dissonant with Flowers. Something like wood, shell, horn, or pearl is best. Do you think there's anything around here that's like that? Or a seed, maybe. Are there any in the yard?

I can attune the sensory wards to you too – I've done it before for guests and my foster children. It's kind of elaborate though. It will take...half an hour to an hour depending on how quickly you can get the mental state for the ritual.:

:There are acorns, if that's spherical enough. In the woods behind the house a little ways.:

:Perhaps, if they're squat and round.:

She will go outside and carefully gather up a bunch of acorns, sorting them and picking the ones that look the most spherical after she's removed the cupule. 

She'll lay them out on the floor and kneel in front of them. Be My Eyes doesn't take a lot of energy, but it requires a fair bit of Control, and Control Marina has.

:I can attune the sensory wards to you, which will let you see through them if you want, but you'll have to participate in the ritual. If you do want to participate, I'll guide you through it.:

:Yeah, let's try it. Just for sound, not for sight, though.:

:Ah, sorry, these are sight wards. I can get materials for hearing wards too. Bones are resonant with sound, especially ear bones. Do you think there are any here?

I'll cast sight wards first, to see if warding works here the same way. I'm thinking yes, since my other spells and rituals do. If it works, I'll cast the hearing wards and include you. I wonder whether your enhanced hearing would work on the wards...on priors, I think not. It would be really cool if it did, though!:

:If animal bones work, yeah, there's some in the woods, but they're farther in and I don't want to go out during the day, I can get them tonight.:

:Do you think you can send to me where I can get them? You can send sensory information via Telepathy too, with practice. That way I can get them. It's best to do Flowers rituals near noon, because noon is resonant to Flowers. It will be harder to do it at night.:

Denice considers this. :I'm not sure I can send all the stuff I'd use to find them without hurting you.:

:Normally I'd offer to test it – I haven't experienced any negative side effects from using Telepathy to transmit sensory information, even one that's not accessible by mundane means, such as me receiving what Opens get from Clairvoyance. But...we don't have reliable access to healing, here, so it seems unwise to take the risk. I'll cast it tomorrow noon, then.

Do you want me to try going to the food bank today, while you listen? Actually, I should try learning food and request/question vocabulary first. Given that I won't be able to use Telepathy to talk to them without alarming them and exposing myself as a cape.:

:I didn't think it would do more than give you a nasty headache, but if you think something worse could happen we definitely shouldn't try it.:

:I'm not sure how the food bank is going to work, I checked it out and it's pretty far away - I can hear it but I don't think you want to walk that far with a bunch of food. But we can do vocabulary, yeah. I want a shower first though.:

:That's what I was thinking too, but it is different systems colliding. So I think I'd rather not, at least, not right now. When circumstances are better, I might revisit it.

How far away is it? I'm stronger than I look – it's one of the passive effects of being awakened to Flowers. I am much, much stronger than the average forty-two year old woman. Though I wouldn't have a bag or a pack to put the food in. Maybe I could use the tote bag? I'll try to see if they'll give me bags there.

Yes, I'll shower after you.:

Marina is happy that she offered to go second, because she doesn't understand the bathroom layout. She knows how bathtubs work, and she also knows about having a bucket and a scoop to pour water on yourself. She does not know how the detachable shower head works.

:It's pretty close to the edge of my range. I don't know if you should take the tote bag - it's a good idea but then if someone finds me here it'll be hard to take the papers. I can check if they have bags before you go.:

She doesn't object to Marina following her into the bathroom to watch her use the shower; she has to spend a little while figuring out how the controls work herself, and then spends a while rinsing the worst of the sweat and ick out of her clothes before ceding it. :We should try to find more clothes soon, too,: she sends, trying to decide whether she wants to put her soaked clothes back on.

Marina comes from a culture that does not have a nudity taboo, so she doesn't feel embarrassed about the whole thing. In any case, she has bathed many children before and is kind of inured to it. 

She follows what Denice did with the controls and washes herself, but she holds off on her clothes.

:Hm, that's true. I think you should check if they have bags, and if they don't, we can consider me taking this one. Or maybe they have a box that I can carry with the food inside.

Indeed. Maybe the food bank will have clothes too? Or know where we might be able to find clothes for free – clothes that no one else wants to wear. Or cloth and rags that I could sew into tunics. I'm not good at it, but I know some.

I don't recommend wearing the wet clothes; they might give you a chill. I would put them up to dry. I suppose that could be a concern if someone arrives, but you have good range, so you might know whether someone is coming well in advance.:

:I can't tell the difference between someone stopping a car here and someone driving by until they start to do it, my range doesn't help much with that.: But she lays the clothes out by the back door where she can grab them if she has to run, and then sits to listen to the food bank. :They do have bags, just little plastic ones but you'll probably be okay,: she reports when Marina comes out.

She has to pause for a moment to process the concept of 'plastic' but understands what Denice means, especially since she encountered plastics in the library before.

:I think I should go to the food bank first, then shower. Actually...we should plan before I go.

The first contingency is that I get identified at the food bank, try to question me about you or arrest me, and I have to run away. The second is if someone tries to enter this house and you have to run away. You'll be able to detect if someone happens to me at the food bank, since your range does extend to it. But I don't have a mechanism to identify whether or not you're here or had to run away.

I'll go ahead and cast Be My Eyes on one of the acorns and place them so that they're looking at the back door. You should keep the tote bag with papers in sight of it – think of it like an eye. If someone comes here, grab it and run away. That way, I'll know that you've gone. I'm going with the tote bag signal because I can't look through the focus the whole time. It requires concentration, especially since they're not optimal.

We should look at the map and find a meeting place where we could wait for each other in case one of us has to run away. Where do you think is good?:

Hmm. :Hold on, let me listen to some things.: And a few minutes later, she'll point out on the map where there are a few more empty houses between the library and the food bank. :This one is best,: she says of one a ways off the main route. :It's farther from other buildings than the others and there's woods there.:

:I'll remember that. Let's wait two days for the other person, and if they don't arrive, we ought to assume that they were captured. Does that sound good to you?

Also, I have another idea. Since I can see through the acorn, and you can hear me traveling, we'll be able to communicate with each other. I can talk to you, and you can talk back to me by writing. That way you can warn me about things you think I ought to avoid, and take a different path. I'll position the acorn closer to the door so that I'll see. You should write big.

An alternate signal for me to know that your location has been compromised is by destroying the acorn. You can step on it to smash it, and it will destroy the ward and I'll notice.:

"Mmhmm." :Another thing is that if you yell my name -: "Denice," :- I'll hear that from pretty far away and I can try to get to you. Don't do it if someone has you, obviously, especially if they don't know you know me. They know they're looking for me with that name.:

:What happens if I move the acorn? Like if I was going to a different house and took it with me.:

:I'll keep that in mind! Or, hm, we could try coming up with a different rare word for me to yell? Would your power help you detect it if we set it in advance? What if I yelled 'Scion' or something?

Sadly the ward will break. The standard version of Be My Eyes, which is the one I know, can't resist being moved. It can withstand being jostled – though that isn't good for image quality – but being moved more than say, a meter, will break it. I've seen permanent portable versions, but in the form of artifice. Artifacts are permanent enchanted objects. I haven't taken artificing classes, and I could probably rederive it, but this is not the time for a research project.:

:If I was more familiar with your voice I'd notice you yelling other things but I think right now it'd have to be my name, unless I was already paying attention. There's a lot of people talking or yelling in my hearing range.:

:That's understandable.

Alright, I think it's time to execute our plan. I'll cast Be My Eyes now. It should take around...fifteen minutes. I won't be able to talk to you during this time. Please disturb me only if someone is about to come in.: Back at home she can do it in eight, but this is an unfamiliar environment that hasn't been specially prepared to be resonant with Flowers casting. It will take longer to fashion the energy of the ward into the correct shapes.

And she will start dancing, this time, with lyrics. It's more of an interpretive dance, or the type of dance you see in musicals, compared to the vigorous hopping and leaping dance she did when she was healing Denice. She makes a lot of broad gestures with her arms, and leaning forward as though she was an explorer looking out into the horizon. The lyrics are a poem about someone leaving home, but not wanting to be estranged from their friends and family, and so pleads for the essence of Flowers to intercede. She repeats the lyrics several times, moving in the same ways each time.

She moves slowly around the most-round acorn she selected, and then kneels before it, cups it in her hand, and carefully sets it in place, with the stem end looking at the back door.

:It's done! I can see through it now, after a moment of concentration. Do you want to test it yourself? I can go outside, and you can hold up fingers, and I'll say aloud how many fingers you're holding up.:

Denice watches the dancing quietly.

:It's fine, I believe you.:

:Alright! In that case, I should get going. I'll follow the route you sent me: she re-checks the map Denice printed out one more time :and give you updates along the way.:

She'll leave out the back door and do so.

She's still kind of adapting to the technology. She has no idea how these black roads were constructed, or how plastics or computers work. She's very confused by the lack of coherent aesthetics or ornamentation, though. Surely, if you were richer, you would have more of that, not less? Though admittedly she'd only seen this one place. Perhaps New York will be different.

The route takes her out of the housing complex and along a busy road with a building full of storefronts on the other side of it. It doesn't take very long for her to come to an intersection where the road she's following is crossed by a similarly busy one, where the cars traveling the same direction she is stop. There are yellow objects hanging from poles overhead; the ones facing her are shining red, while the ones facing the cross street are shining green.

Um. She has no idea how to navigate this. Carriages drawn by horses or Fire practitioners are banned inside the city walls, and there are no four-way intersections in the road network connecting the city to other places. The colored lights are presumably some sort of signaling mechanism – there would be no need for lighting outside in the middle of the day...

The paths perpendicular to her route are clear, but the paths parallel to her aren't. Presumably at some point it will reverse? Surely the cars won't be left sitting there forever. She'll...wait until the movement of the cars changes such that the path in front of her isn't occupied by cars anymore. If it takes longer than five minutes she'll try looking for an alternate path or seeing if there's a lull in the number of cars and try to dash across. Not really the safest option, but what can she do?

After a few seconds the lights change, green through yellow to red, and then one lane of the cross street is shown a green arrow and the cars there turn onto the street beside her; after a few more seconds they change again, and when the lights facing her are green, the cars next to her begin to move.

Alright. The path parallel to her is now clear because the cars traveling parallel will block the cars traveling perpendicular. She really wants to try and figure out the mechanism – is it controlled by anyone? Are they nearby? – but she suppresses this instinct and runs across. Just to be safe.

She'll pause for a minute beside a tree and focus on her ward: has the bag been taken? Has the ward been destroyed? If not, is Denice trying to send her a written message?

Everything looks quiet at home; Denice is reading one of last night's printouts.

Great! In that case she will continue her pattern of walking straight until she comes to some sort of corner or intersection, and then reviewing the map she memorized for which way to go.

She thinks she's gotten the hang of the signal light intersections now. Will there be any other obstacles aside from it?

Not particularly. The road continues to be pretty busy, and takes her by various shops at varying distances - they're set back from the road to allow space for people to leave their cars outside, proportionally to how big the shops are, with the biggest ones having hundreds of feet of asphalt between themselves and the road. The distant ones don't seem to have windows at all, but even the nearer ones are too far away to see much about what's inside, and they don't seem to have their wares on display in any case, just occasional signage.

Eventually, the road takes her over a bridge beneath which runs a much larger, busier road.

This is so different from how anything is laid out in Sarana Province, where she lived. Not that she's particularly well traveled, though she expects that city layouts would be the same everywhere in her world because they don't have cars. There is so much space for cars! She supposes that if this world is rich enough for everyone to have cars, then it's unnecessary to walk, and it's better to lay a city out to accommodate them. She likes walking, but she knows many that don't or can't walk, or can't walk far. It's very sad that she can't window shop, though.

It's mildly unnerving to be on a bridge on top of the enormously wide road – she has never seen a road that wide – but she passes through it without incident.

Belatedly, she notices that this city doesn't have any city walls. Huh. If this world was more peaceful than hers, and it probably is, given how wealthy they are, then there wouldn't be any need for them. So the city could expand as much as it needs to and not be constrained by walls.

The road she's following becomes less busy as she continues past the bridge, and soon her instructions have her turning onto a less busy side street that brings her by tall, glass-walled buildings of unclear purpose - the signage on these is much more understated, and they have fewer cars around them and no people coming and going. After passing a few of these, she comes to another bank of shops; her printed instructions have her following the road in front of them, but she could just as easily walk along the storefronts and rejoin the road at the other end.

So much glass! Probably they have mechanisms for putting out that much glass of that much quality. She's still not used to the aesthetic incoherency in this city. It's fascinating, but she doesn't think she likes it.

Well she is going to be Very Disobedient and walk along the storefronts and rejoin the road at the other end. She can't buy anything, both because she doesn't speak English and because she has no money, but looking is free! Even if she was never able to return to Kosofo – she would still want to try and transmit this world's knowledge to them. Maybe it's possible to talk to them via the internet – it seems similar to the Openet.

The stores are:

- a restaurant serving long white foodstuff with other ingredients inside

- an office of some sort with a handful of people working at desks, one of whom is speaking to a pair of customers

- a small, pungent shop with two lit signs in the window, too cluttered inside to make sense of without stopping to examine it

- a larger shop with a desk, a waiting area, and a curtain blocking her view through the doorway to the back room

- another restaurant, serving soft, multicolored food in bowls, sometimes with toppings, with a slight chill to the air around its door

- an empty storefront

- a small clothing store, offering form-fitting outfits in mostly blue and white, with a variety of striped and geometric patterns that generally follow the lines of the wearer's body

- another large shop, this one with people inside walking in place on machines or doing other machine-assisted exercise

- a large restaurant serving mostly sandwiches

- a store selling various mysterious rectangles; one wall hosts a huge collection of brightly colored ones, while a dozen or so black ones are individually displayed on pedestals around the shop floor

- a small shop where the workers are doing something to their customers' hands; again she'd have to stop and stare to get a better idea of what's happening there

- another desk-and-waiting-area establishment, this one with a more austere aesthetic of white and grey

- another sandwich restaurant, this one much plainer inside

- a bed store

- a hair salon

- another empty storefront

- another restaurant, this one decorated in lush red and black and gold and smelling of warm spices; the tables of this one are set too far back for her to get a good look at the food it serves

She has no idea what it is, and thinks that it's some sort of bakery selling small loaves, until she realizes that it's actually flatbread wrapped around ingredients. That makes more sense.

Sadly she can't tell what's happening in the office, and can't divine its purpose from the signage either.

She wants to stop and examine it but she will not delay on her quest to Obtain Food to do it. The tragedy.

A situation similar to the office.

She cannot tell what this one is either! But if it's cold, maybe it's serving chilled things? Kosofo does import ice that people keep in cellars – though it's expensive.

Ooh! She has to resist the temptation to try the clothes because she does prefer more form-fitting things than loose things, mostly. She has no idea what kind of fabric they're made of that they can stick so close to the skin like that. Does it have stays or something? It doesn't look like corsetry...

She has no idea what this is, though she realizes later that it's a gymnasium with unfamiliar equipment.

Sandwiches! She is also familiar with this, though bread isn't so common in Kosofo.

Hm. She's thinking that the rectangles are computers like the one in the library – they kind of have similar image layouts, she thinks.

Sadly she cannot stop. She realizes later that it's most likely some sort of salon for getting your nails painted – she is familiar with the concept. She doesn't like painting her nails, though.

Another office!

She cannot stop to try to examine the differences between this sandwich shop and the other one.

She is familiar with the concept of beds, though she doesn't know what the mattresses here are made out of.

She is also familiar with hair salons. She likes to keep her hair tied up, especially when she's doing ritual work and dancing all over the place.

Empty storefront!

That's too bad. The food smells delicious, but, well, it's not like she could buy any, anyway. She really doesn't think the food bank, which is a charity, would give out expensive spices to people, but once she has her own money she can buy her own.

She's nearly there, by this point; once she gets to the end of the strip mall she just has to turn onto the next road and walk a little ways up it, past what looks like a house with a sign out front like a business. The food pantry just past it has a slightly larger footprint but only one story, and has a small group of vaguely-bedraggled people waiting at picnic tables out front. There's room to sit with them, if she'd like to, or she can try the door.

She won't sit with the people at the table – she's not sure if she'd be welcome – but she'll stay here for about five minutes or so to observe. Are other people going into the place? Are other people exiting? What are they carrying inside, and what are they carrying outside? Are there guards? Does anyone look armed? Does anyone have rifles or swords, at least where she can see? Does anyone have threatening body language – she's gotten much better at reading that ever since she awakened to Flowers.

Nobody seems to be armed at all, and the people at the tables are mostly talking to each other genially and not particularly on guard; one is instead reading a book and taking notes in a notebook. After a few minutes a slender woman in her late 20s comes out carrying a box of food, followed by an older man in blue jeans and a flannel shirt who calls a name out to the people waiting at the tables before noticing Marina. "Oh, hey, are you here for food? You can come in and sign up if you are."

That's good. 

"Yes! Thank you," she says, smiling. She's practiced those three words enough that she's sure she said them correctly. She has no idea what 'sign up' means, but she said that she could come in. So she will. What does the inside look like? What are the other people who were previously sitting now doing? Presumably she'll be able to glean what 'sign up' means based on what they do...actually what's she's going to do is walk slowly so that the others pass her, and then she can observe. 

Only one of the people from the benches goes in, an older man carrying a padded cloth bag. Inside, she finds herself in a wide hallway made of cinder blocks painted a cheerful pale yellow; there's a set of double doors in front of her, and another one off to her left. The man in the flannel shirt greets the old man and leads him over to where a row of tables holds boxes of food; they ignore her, and it's a young man seated at a flimsy table by the door who greets her next. "Hi, welcome to the food bank, have you signed up with us before?"

Oh wow, this is already taxing her knowledge of English. She really just walked in here with day's worth of English practice, didn't she.

She did learn 'before', it was in the children's books. 

She thinks. An awkward several long second pause passes where she just kind of looks at the flannel shirt man.

"No. How do you do it?" She hopes she got the interrogative tone correct. Towan has grammatical tone, so she was on the lookout for tone contours.

"You just fill out this form," he takes one from a bunch sticking up out of a holder on the side of the table and puts it on a clipboard to give her, "and we'll get you all set up."

There are pens available in a cup on the table, but no chair for her. The form asks for her name, the date, her address including the city, state, and zip code, the number of people in her household and how many of them are adults or children, and whether she's receiving assistance from the government, and has a place for her to sign and date it. Of course she's only going to understand a fraction of those words at best.

"Thank you," she says, and receives the clipboard with the paper and takes a pen. 

Yep. She indeed only knows a fraction of those words. She knows 'name', and 'city' and 'adult' and 'children' and 'government' and the function words, but she doesn't know the rest. She does understand how forms work, though. She's filled out many a grant application in her lifetime. Everyone in the Federation can be expected to be literate, so a lot of bureaucracy is based on forms.

She guesses that it needs her name, where she lives, and...maybe whether she's an adult or a child? That's not enough to fill out the form, though, and she's kind of like, homeless, so.

Planning time. The easiest solution would be to simply reach out with Telepathy and ask for help. But that would also expose her as a cape, and thus Someone You Should Pay Attention To, and so that solution is out. She supposes she could try to ask one of the people outside, who are unrelated to the organization that runs the food bank, but that still carries risk.

Instead, what she's going to do is write down all the parts that contain words she doesn't know on her forearm – can the pen write on skin?

It can!

"You can bring that with you and come back with it later, if you want," the man says, when he notices what she's doing.

"Thank you!" she says again, brightly. She's really getting a lot of mileage out of that phrase. She does so!

She'll take the paper but leave behind the pen, and then backtrack, going away from the food bank and trying to look for a place that doesn't have many people in it. Can she find one? A dumpster similar to the one she found Denice in would work, or some sort of park. Or an empty building.

It's pretty deserted behind the stores from earlier, if she looks there.

She will go there.

Denice said that Marina could yell her name, and she would come to her. But...she doesn't want Denice to come here, but she does want to get her attention. Sigh.

If she focuses on her ward, is it still there? What can she see? Provided there's still a connection and it hasn't been destroyed, she'll say 'Denice' out loud in a normal conversational volume. She'll do that until she sees movement through the ward, or a minute passes.

Denice doesn't react right away to Marina saying her name, but after the third try she stops reading and looks at the acorn.

Alright!

...she realizes that she can't cast Telepathy through this distance. The English oral practical exam continues.

"I am Marina. Is safe. You hear me? I see you. You write, I see."

It's a good thing Marina needs Denice's writing to be large, because that's what she's getting; Denice has real trouble even holding a pen, never mind making tiny motions with it. But after a minute, she holds up to the acorn:

I hear you.

It works! She realizes again that Denice will only be able to communicate back to her in English. So she'll have to receive explanations via English too. Or drawings.

"Food bank safe. I go in and they give food. But. They want me write paper. Paper ask for," and she takes away her focus on the ward and looks at the paper, "name, da-te, add-reese, city, suh-ta-te, zip ko-de, number of people in how-se-hol-duh, how ma-ni adults and children, 'are you re-kei-vin-guh a-si-suh-tan-ke from the government', sig-na-tu-re. What write?"

She hopes English is phonetic enough that Denice will be able to divine what the words actually are from her guesses at their pronunciation. But if worst comes to worst, she'll spell them out.

wait

name - Marina

date - May 28th

address - none

city state zip -

people - 2

adults - 1

children - 1

government - no

and for the signature she draws a squiggle with no particular resemblance to any of the letters Marina has seen so far. She props the sheets of paper she's written on up against her leg for Marina to refer to.

She waits for Denice to give her the answers, and she will faithfully reproduce everything that Denice wrote with exactitude. Including the signature squiggle! She practices a few times, lifting her shirt and trying to make it on her stomach – she remembers that the person noticed her writing on her forearm – and then finally puts it on the paper.

She's surprised, but also not surprised, that you can just elect not to write down your address. She doesn't know what the specific word 'none' means, but the fact that Denice didn't give her answers to the other addresses clues her in as it meaning 'not applicable' or similar. If this is a charitable organization, then of course they're going to have to work with the homeless.

"Okay. I writed. I go back and give paper. If they don't like paper, I go here again and ask you help."

She will wait for a minute. If Denice doesn't give any reply, then she'll take that as her giving the go-ahead for her to return to the food bank.

Back at the food bank, the young man takes her form and begins transcribing the information to a different sheet. "Do you have somewhere to cook?"

She is so thankful that one of the occupations and professions children's books she read had chefs in it. She latches on to the word 'cook' and makes a noise and expression of understanding, but it still actually takes her several seconds to go word-by-word in her head and figure out what the man is trying to say to her.

"Sorry, no." She looks very sad about it, because she is.

She supposes she could start a fire, but there aren't any utensils or pots that she can use to actually cook with. And starting a fire might make the neighbors Very Concerned. So the answer will be no.

"It's okay, we can give you food that doesn't need it. How old is your child?"

Wait she doesn't know numbers. Or, well, she does, she knows that this language has a base-10 numbering scheme rather than base-12, and she knows the symbols for the numbers. It's just that she doesn't know the pronunciation of 'fifteen'. In Towan you just concatenate them, but she knows Topona has a different scheme. Okay, she's kind of spent too long staring...

"One five," she says, though she tries gesturing with her hands too. She puts up both fists, then opens them, closes them, and opens one fully. Does the other person understand her?

He seems a little startled, but only a little. "Okay. Do you have ID?" He's talking more slowly now. "It's fine if you don't, we can make you one."

She keeps not knowing words and it's very sad!! It's even sadder because the solution to her ignorance is right there but she can't use it!! What is 'aidii'. But apparently they can make one for her if she doesn't have one. So presumably it's another thing that the food bank does for free, because it's a charitable organization. She can probably say she doesn't have one safely, then.

Thank the stars, he's speaking more slowly. This place, at least, is not one of those places that will brush you off if you don't speak the language well.

"I don't, sorry." She again looks very sad.

"Okay." Write write write. "Come stand over here so I can take your picture," he says, picking up a hand-sized silver boxy thing and leading her to a bit of empty wall.

Picture? It again takes her several seconds to jog her memory of what that means...ah. It's probably some sort of cyanotype, or a more technologically advanced version, that will make a portrait of her very quickly.

She has to remind herself that she is not the one being hunted by an institution, and that she is a total stranger to everyone here.

She'll brush her hair a little with her hands and be led to the wall. She will have a neutral expression.

He points the silver thing at her and it makes noises for a second. "Okay, all done. You can wait outside, we'll call you when we're ready for you."

"Thank you," she says again, and will go outside. She's honestly rather nervous, but she hides it well. She thinks.

She'll wait outside, then. Does anything happen?

Only three of the people who were originally waiting are still there, and the one with the book has collected her box and is munching on an apple from it while she works. The other two give her a curious look, but don't interrupt their conversation to greet her; after a few minutes a middle-aged woman comes out of the food bank with her box and one of the two is called in. Around this time, another group of half a dozen people show up, all carrying padded bags like the man from earlier; one of them goes up to the door to get the young man, who comes out to take a census.

It continues on about like this - someone comes out of the food bank with a box and someone else is called in to replace them every five or ten minutes - five more times before she's called.

"Okay. This is your ID," the young man says, offering her a slim plastic rectangle with her name and photo on one side and the logo from the sign out front on the other. "You need to bring it every time you come, or we can't give you anything. This is your cold bag," a padded one like the people outside have, "and you need to bring it if you want cold food. If you lose it it's five dollars for a replacement or you can bring your own if you have one. You can come by Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday in the afternoon for pickup - we're open from one to five. This packet explains all our policies, and this one is information about resources for the homeless, you can call them for help with finding a place to live. Do you understand?"

She will wait patiently! There are no scary people that have arrived to come and take her away, nor is anything bad happening to the people who go inside.

She will accept the slim plastic rectangle in both hands. She still doesn't have an intuitive sense for plastic – one part of her expected it to be heavy and cold like iron or bronze, while the other part of her expected it to be light and bendable like paper. She will also accept the padded bag. 

"Sorry. I understand some. Can I paper..." she mimes her right hand scribbling something. "Can I write down?"

"Sure." He has blank paper and pens and a clipboard she can use.

"Thank you," she says again, accepting the paper and pens and clipboard.

She'll write down stuff in Towan. If the man is looking at her write – it will look nothing like Roman letters. It looks like a cross between Devanagari and Hebrew script. While she writes, she tries to repeat what the man said to her as she understood it.

"My ID," she says, picking up the rectangle. "I bring when I go here, or I get nothing. My cold bag," she says, picking up the bag, "I bring if I want cold food. What is 'replacement'?"

"If you lose it - if you don't have it anymore and can't bring it - you tell us and we give you a new one for five dollars. Or you can buy one somewhere else, but that's usually more expensive, it costs more money."

She is a very good student and will studiously write notes.

"Ah, five dollars for new one. Or can get one from other place. And...I can get food here Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday. One to five." She has no idea what 'one to five' means here but she'll ask Denice about that later. It seems to be related to the time.

She then holds up the packet. "This explains...sorry, I do not know 'policies'. But the other one can read about help finding house."

"That's right. Policies are how we do things, like we have a spice pantry that you can get something from once a month, or you can talk to the workers to change what days you can come, it tells you that. Or you can ask, if you have questions - Maria who's here on Tuesdays and Wednesdays speaks Spanish, if that's easier for you."

"Oh, like rule." Wow! They'll actually give her spices! Only once a month, which is...she forgot how much time a month is. But still! 

She continues writing. "I can ask change when I come. I can ask Maria on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Maria speaks Spanish." She wants to say that she doesn't actually know Spanish, but that might prompt questions of what language she actually speaks. And if she was transported into a wholly new world, well, no one here will speak any languages she speaks. So she might as well not broach the topic.

Marina has brown skin, though her facial features suggest she's Middle Eastern or North African than Hispanic.

"I write down everything now," she says, finally.

"Okay." He takes his clipboard and pen back. "Bill over there is in charge of the boxes today, he'll help you get your food together."

Bill - the man in the flannel shirt - has a box prepared for her, with bread and tortillas and peanut butter and applesauce and peanuts and cheese crackers and chocolate chips and canned corn and peas and black beans and hand soap and shampoo and two sticks of deodorant, and a plastic bag with lunch meat and string cheese and sliced cheese and a quart of milk and a bag of ice. "Does all this look good to you? Anything here you can't eat, any special requests?"

Marina will once again thank the man and then go to Bill.

Wow! She cannot read English and so cannot figure out what the yellow-orange jelly or brown paste is, though from the pictures on the label they have to do with apples and peanuts. This is so much food! It will last the two of them days! 

She's a little concerned about the cheese and milk. Back in her apartment in Kosofo, she had a keepbox – a Tranquil artifact that would preserve food that was kept in it. Though it was really expensive, it was cheaper than trying to use iceboxes – Kosofo is in the subtropics where winter is cold, but not cold enough that the lakes and rivers freeze over and their ice can be harvested. Any ice they use has to be imported from the south, where it's colder. There is no such appliance in the empty house they're living in. Although...they are providing ice too. They can probably eat all the perishables today and then the nonperishables they can eat later.

She's also concerned about the corn, peas, and beans. She recognizes the vegetables from the pictures on the cover, and she knows that they require cooking.

She points to the cans. "This need cook. I cannot...use cook. No place cook."

"These are pre-cooked, they're safe to eat cold - I don't think we have any fresh vegetables that don't need to be cooked, I guess I can give you some fruit instead if you want."

She takes a moment to process that, and then realizes what he's trying to say. "Oh! Already cook! No need. This good." She looks genuinely delighted. While she would be interested in the fruit, the corn, beans, and peas will fill them up more. Which is the main concern right now.

"Thank you, thank you!" she says, beaming with happiness. She might have leaked some of that happiness through – involuntary inducement of emotions is an effect of being awakened to Flowers – but she remembers to clamp down on that. She will merely look Very Happy and Relieved.

"Sounds good, then. Did you want something from the spice pantry today?"

She does, but she kind of like, can't really use spices to their full extent when she can't cook. It would be a waste. And if she can only have access to the spice pantry once a month, then she'd rather save that for when she can use it. If she'll even be here in a month's time, which seems...unlikely. Though if that's the case, then she might as well take some now, because she won't be able to get them in the future.

She briefly considers the prospect of using spices as trade goods, before realizing that if this world is rich enough to be able to provide well, people who are essentially beggars with spices, then the value of spices must not be that high. 

"Yes, please," she ends up saying.

"Okay, that's just down here." A cardboard tray past the rows of boxes holds shakers of a variety of basic spices, two-packs of salt and pepper shakers sealed together in plastic, bundles of three packets of taco seasoning, and a handful of spice blends in shakers with colorful lids.

She recognizes salt, though she's unsure why it's bundled with pepper. She has no idea what taco seasoning is, and the spice blends in shakers she's not sure about. She doesn't seem to be able to get the smell of the spices inside from the taco seasoning packets, so she doesn't take those. For the shakers – she'll try to find one that has cinnamon in it. She really likes cinnamon, even though it's so expensive. She still kind of can't believe they're just giving it away like that.

She'll take the cinnamon shaker, if available, plus one two-pack of salt and pepper shakers.

They do have cinnamon! It's a good sized container, too, it'll plausibly last her a month or two if she's at all frugal with it. "You're only supposed to get one," Bill comments when she reaches for the salt and pepper, "but it's fine this time, we have plenty of those."

Ah! Well, she supposes that spices here are cheaper, not cheap. Well, in that case she'd rather the spices go to people who'd be better placed to use them.

"I'm sorry. Other people need spices also, I understand. I take this one," she says, putting down the cinnamon and taking the salt and pepper shaker instead. How big are the salt and pepper shakers? She might try drying and salting the meat to make it last longer if there's enough salt.

They're reasonably sized for personal use as seasoning; probably not enough to salt meat with.

That's too bad. Regardless, she'll take the salt and pepper shaker and put it in the box. She'll thank Bill and be on her way, unless there's anything else that she has to do.

Nope, that's all. Bill puts her plastic bag of perishables in her cold bag - which turns out to be metallic silver on the inside - and the cold bag in the space he's left in the box for it, and hands it over, and goes over to check the list for the next person to call in while she leaves.

Wow! The inside is silvered? But...she feels the inside of the bag, and it's soft, and not cold like metal. She'll have to ask Denice what it's made of later. She will thank Bill again and leave, and suppress the joyous squealing that is threatening to erupt from her.

After she leaves, she'll check in on Denice with her ward before returning to the house. How is she?

Not in view, though the tote bag is still there.

Great! She will now return home with her quest rewards, and probably be faster now, now that she's already traveled the route and not need to consult her map so much, and also because she now knows how to navigate the Red-Yellow-Green Light zones.

The most interesting thing that happens on the walk home is that she encounters a woman walking a dog that really, really wants to see what's in her box; she stops and holds him back before he gets close enough to jump on Marina or anything, saying 'sorry!', and a quick detour onto the grass is all it takes to resolve the problem.

She is so confused? What was the woman doing with the dog – was she being pulled by the dog, like a sled? Surely not. Is it like, some sort of trained dog that can do tricks or tasks? In any case, she's glad that the dog didn't get too close, otherwise she might have had to use Telepathy or a scary glamor to tell it to go away, which might have exposed her.

She'll check in again about a block away from the house where Denice is, to be on the safe side.

She's back reading her printouts; everything seems to be fine.

She will enter through the back door. Is it locked? If it is, she'll call out to Denice to open it.

And then she will show her what she got! It's so much food! Food food food. And other stuff besides. She got soap and spices too. And a silver bag! She is radiating happiness and she will not do anything to suppress it this time.

It's not locked. Denice is pretty excited about the food too, and wants Marina's help pulling the refrigerator out enough that they can get behind it to plug it in.

Oh! She asks Denice what a refrigerator is through Telepathy, and figures out that it's an icebox that makes its own ice! So cool!!

She will be able to help. Her being a Flowers practitioner means that she is much stronger than she looks. With another person helping, they should be able to pull it out without too much trouble, even if she has to provide most of the strength.

:Will it start getting cold when we plug it in?:

:I think so. I've never done this before but all the other houses' refrigerators are the same except that they're plugged in, so probably.:

She will plug it in. It's quite intuitive. Does it work?

Relatedly, she'll show Denice the rectangle. :They took my picture there and gave me an 'aidii'. Do you know what this is? They said I should bring it with me whenever I come, or I won't be able to get any food otherwise.:

It hums to life! It's not immediately obvious whether it's getting colder inside.

:An ID, identification. So they know who you are. I think this is just for that one place, it has their name on the back.:

She'll check on it in a little while to see if it gets colder. She didn't expect it to be instant.

:Oh, I see! You mentioned identification yesterday, and how not having it makes things harder. It would have been nice if I could use this to be able to access other services. But at least it will work for the food bank.

They also told me a bunch of things which might be useful to us, like help about getting a house. I'm not sure if it will be applicable to us, but it's something we ought to check out. I can tell you about it while we eat. What do you want to eat, anyway?:

Hm. She realizes that she doesn't know how to open the cans. She's looking for some sort of tab or handle or rope you pull, or a cap that you twist, but she can't see any. If it's pre-cooked...is it sealed? She doesn't have a knife on her. Oh well. They can eat the other things instead until they get a knife or some sort of opening tool.

:We need dishes and utensils for a lot of this stuff. I'll go get some tonight, there's a place not too far from here that has a bunch of things like that that we need. We can do sandwiches with the bread and meat and cheese right now, though.: She checks out the packaging. :Turkey and salami. Do you care which one we eat first?:

Is she going to steal plates and cutlery.

:Ah! Where will you go for the dishes and utensils? And yes, those sandwiches sound lovely. I'm not sure what salami is. Will it spoil faster than the turkey? We should eat the one that will spoil first, in the case it takes time for the refrigerator to get cold.:

:Right.: She examines the packages closely. :Salami is also meat but it's saltier and fattier and spicier. ...the turkey expires in two weeks and the salami expires in three.: She puts the salami back and attempts, unsuccessfully, to open the turkey container by pulling at a corner.

:What meat is salami made of? And in that case we should eat the turkey, then. Do you know how long it will take before the other things spoil? Also, do you think you could read the stuff that's written on the other food packages for me? I don't recognize most of the words.:

:They have the dates they're good until written on them, I can check. They also say what they're made of...: she gets the salami back out and reads its ingredients list; it's made of chicken, beef hearts, pork, corn syrup, water, mustard seed, garlic, sugar, and several ingredients that she doesn't know anything about besides that they're probably kinds of salt. And then she can read off the nutrition information (what is a calorie? we just don't know) and the blurb about who it was distributed by, and point out the brand logo on the front, the printed seal asserting that it's been inspected, the name of the food and brief description of it, the printed seal asserting that it was Made in the USA, the refrigeration instructions ('Keep refrigerated. For best quality, purchase and use by date shown. Once opened, use within 7 days.'), and other less comprehensible markings ('est⁰ 1883', 'NET WT 16 OZ (1 LB)').

:That's a lot of ingredients!: She's not surprised about the listing of ingredients – the Federation does that too – though she is surprised by the specification of eat-by dates. She also has no idea what a 'calorie' is!

:Thank you very much. I don't think it's super important, but I'll record the words I don't know, and also the ones you don't, and the next time we go to a library we can go look them up.: She does so.

:Sure. These are all kinds of food I'm used to eating but maybe there's something we should know.:

She checks the expiration dates on the rest of the food, and it's a jumble; the bread and milk unsurprisingly expire soonest, at about a week, but then the others range at random from expiring in a few weeks (the cheese crackers) to expiring in three years (the peas). Marina may also notice as Denice does this that she's hesitant to handle the chocolate chip package.

She notices, but doesn't know how to interpret it. And in any case, she does know that chocolate lasts seasons, so it's not a priority to eat it now.

:Where are you planning on getting the utensils and plates? Do you want or need my help? I can talk to you about what they talked to me at the food bank.

Oh, and if you need help on opening the turkey container, I can help you. How do you open this package?: She has noticed that Denice has issues with fine motor control.

:It says 'pull to open' and the arrow points that way, I don't know what I'm doing wrong.: She passes the turkey over. :A few stores have plates and stuff but the big ones have cameras, so I can't go there. There was a little one you passed that had those and clothes and books and toys and stuff, I'm thinking I'll go there - you can come if you want but it might be safer just with me, if I hear something bad I won't have to figure out how to explain it. I was listening to you at the food bank but we can talk about it if you want.:

:Alright, I'll take a look.: What does the turkey container look like? Her expectation is that there's a lower container and then some sort of lid. Is it that the bottom part of the container is solid, whereas the former is a film? In that case, there might be a way to separate the film from the container and pull it off. She'll try doing that.

:I admit I feel very uncomfortable with stealing, but I understand that we have little choice at the time. I think it's wiser for you to go alone – I don't have your super senses: and because she might get a bout of non-antisocial-ism and back out.

:I see! I wasn't sure that you were getting everything, but if you already heard, then I won't explain it to you. I'll ask you to help me with some of the vocabulary later, though.:

:Yeah, I don't think I have another choice besides stealing, or dying, or going back, and I knew before I left that it was going to be like this. If there was a way to do it without anyone getting hurt I'd do that but I don't think there is one and I think I have been hurt enough, I want to do something else now.:

The turkey is indeed in a more-solid container topped with a taut film; the film is already separated from the container at the marked corner, so all she has to do is grab it and pull.

Pull she does!

:I understand. I hope that we'll be able to arrange something better soon so that both you and I can live better. Maybe something through the homeless services thing, or perhaps the PRT. Speaking of which, I might try going to the library later during daytime, alone, and see if they let me through. If the food bank did, then probably the library will too? We can do the same procedure we did last time.

Actually, you mentioned yesterday that the computer there knew where we were, so maybe it had transmitted its location. It's still in your range, right? Do you think you'd be able to detect whether there are armed or armored people there?:

It opens right up. :Yeah, give me a minute...:

:Nobody there has guns or anything weird like that. And you can definitely get in, they aren't talking to people who just go in, I only hear people talking to them to take books and stuff.:

:That's good! Though I'll probably have to talk to them if I want to use the computer.

I think we should eat now. After that, I'll go to the library and see if the PRT has replied. I'll ask you later how you got the email to work and how I should access it.:

If Denice has no complaints, then she'll make herself sandwiches and eat them! She doesn't know how Denice likes hers, so she'll let her make her own. 

:Yeah, that works.:

The only real option here is 'dry bread and turkey with cheese' or 'dry bread and turkey without cheese'; left to her own devices she'll try to take a cheese slice, end up ripping it in half, put the half she's managed to get onto her first sandwich and eat the rest plain.

She will do 'dry bread and turkey with cheese'. It would taste better warm, but at least she's eating something more substantial than the snacks from yesterday. She's very hungry, so she'll end up having two of them.

:Do you want me to help you make the sandwich, or do you want to do it yourself?:

...she would like a secret third thing, which is not to be having this adult/child-coded interaction. She stares at Marina about it for a moment and then looks away without answering and goes back to what she was doing.

Marina will not press the issue and will also say nothing. It's great that they're talking by Telepathy, because that means they can talk without needing to stop eating.

She'll ask Denice what things to do to the computer and what keywords to look out for to access email. She's not going to ask her questions about how email works on a mechanistic level, but simply what steps to take to look at the email, and then exit.

:By the way, you can send me images through Telepathy too. That might be more helpful for me, if you can remember what it looked like.:

She'll describe the process of getting into the email account, then. The account name is 'blankpage6' (from a song that she could hear on the radio and the number the computer they were at was labeled with, in an attempt at not giving out any unnecessary personal information) and the password is 'hammer' (from the next song the radio played) and she can visualize those letters for Marina to write.

:Thank you: she will send, and write down those letters, and also write down a list of the steps in Towan.

She wants to minimize the chance of repeating the tiring incident from earlier, so she'll also ask Denice how to say a bunch of phrases like "Can I use the computers?" and the like. Denice can't help with speaking, but she can transmit text through Telepathy that Marina can read, and Denice can tell her whether or not her speech is comprehensible. Marina isn't looking to master American English phonetics – even if she speaks with a heavy accent, it's good enough so long as Denice can get what she's saying.

That is not actually true; Denice is dramatically better at picking up what people are trying to say through a thick accent than most people are as a side effect of her super hearing. But she can troubleshoot Marina's mouth movements again to get the most obvious problems solved, and that'll work well enough.

That will work! Marina will thank Denice.

:It's time for me to go. We can follow the same procedure we did last time. I'll check in on you every once in a while, and if the bag is gone or the acorn is destroyed, then I'll know you had to leave, and I'll meet you at the empty house.:

If Denice has no objections, she'll take the paper with her notes about email plus her phrases, and the printed out map, and be on her way.

Yep, that's fine.

And once she's gone, Denice will... go pace. Out of sight of the acorn and the front windows.

She will not notice this!

Will she encounter obstacles on the way to the library? She doesn't want to look at any more shops now, and will take the direct route to the library.

If she remembers the route they took last night, that's about as direct as it gets; if she goes by what's on the map instead of cutting through the forest, it'll take a little longer. In both cases, nobody bothers her: there aren't many people out walking around and she only passes someone on the sidewalk once, and he doesn't try to talk to her.

She'll go through the road. She has no idea what forests are like here, and she'd rather follow the landmark that is the road rather than risk getting lost in the forest, even if it's only a small chance. She does not have miles-long sensory ranges.

That is good! She is not up for talking.

She will then enter the library through its front door. Is there someone there? Does someone try to talk to her? Is access to the computers gated somehow – are there employees there guarding them?

There are people reading books in comfy chairs and at tables, and browsing the stacks, and reading magazines and newspapers in a nook set aside for that, and using the computers, and someone with a wheeled cart full of books putting them back on the shelves, and someone reading a book to a group of children in the children's section, and a few people behind the big desk near the entrance and someone else seated behind a smaller desk by the computers. Almost everyone is dressed casually, and the exception - if Marina can tell that he's an exception without having seen a suit before - is reading a newspaper in the periodicals nook; nobody is obviously guarding anything.

Yep! That does look like a library. She notices that what the man is wearing is something she hasn't seen before. She doesn't know what it signals though – this world's clothing styles and norms are wholly unfamiliar to her.

It doesn't seem like things are laid out such that you have to get advance permission to use the computers. So...she will approach one of them. Does someone stop her? If not, is the computer already turned on? Is the screen glowing or is it dark?

The screen is dark with a few words of text floating gently around it, bouncing when they reach the edges of the screen.

This was not in her notes. The teacher did not cover this material in the lectures!! Most unfair exam ever!!

Okay. She will...move the mouse. Denice said that's how you move the cursor at things. Does that do anything?

The screen lights up! The screen is different from any of the ones in her notes; she's expecting a plain rectangle with a little bit of text and a single long rectangle inside it to put the password Denice gave her into, but this screen shows a taller, thinner rectangle with two rectangles, one big one with some fancy text and then a long thin password-entry-like one under some more text.

Goodness gracious. Does she want to ask Denice for help again? Maybe she could ask the librarian.

Hm. It might be that Denice didn't remember super accurately? She doesn't have super-sight, after all. What if she types the email address on the password-entry-like one and presses 'Enter' like she was told to?

A small rectangle appears over the big one with some text and two even smaller rectangles in it.

Okay she gives up. She'll remove the text that she entered by pressing Backspace repeatedly, and then stand up and go to the people behind the big desk next to the entrance.

"Hello," she says. "Can I use the computers?"

(Pressing backspace doesn't work with the small rectangle there; the computer chimes at her if she tries it. If she noticed that Denice was able to remove rectangles from the screen by clicking the X in the corner, though, that does work on this one.)

"Sure, go talk to Anne at the computer desk and she'll set you up." The librarian points at the woman behind the smaller desk near the computers.

(Oh dear. Well, she can pattern-match and will click the X. She'll leave when it doesn't resolve the problem.)

She will go to the woman the librarian points to and says, "Hello. Can I use the computers?"

"Yup! Just write your name and the time here and I'll put you in the system." She offers a clipboard with a half-filled-out lined section on it.

She has learned from the previous Form-Filling Debacle how to put down her name. But she actually hasn't learned how timekeeping here works. The house they're staying at doesn't have a clock, and if this is a different world, then they'll tell time differently. Even though, at least from what she's noticed, the day lengths are similar. 

"Sorry. What is time now?" she'll ask.

She checks her watch. "Five forty."

She recognizes "five" and "four"! So she'll put down the numbers "5" and "4" on the sheet. Does Anne accept this?

...you know what, sure, she'll just fix that up herself. And then typetty type on the computer on the desk, and she writes a string of letters on a little card for Marina. "There's your password, you're on computer three. Do you need help signing in?"

She wants to try doing it herself, but since Anne is offering already, she might as well take advantage of it now.

"Yes, please. I want to use email."

"Okay. Hotmail, or something else?"

Ummmmmmmmmm. She knows the individual words 'hot' and 'mail'. But she guesses that's a name.

She will resist the urge to run away from potential embarrassment and go boldly into the frontier.

"Yes, Hotmail." And if it transpires to not be Hotmail, she will look very stupid but honestly she doubts she would have gotten far enough to even have tried Hotmail without help. 

Anne walks her to the computer and sits, and quickly has the familiar email page on the screen. "There you go." And she'll leave her to it.

Marina's instructions didn't account for this, of course, but she can probably find the right spot in them to continue from.

"Thank you!" She beams at her.

Alright. Yes, this is familiar territory now. She'll take out her paper and put in her username and password in the boxes, and then click the smaller rectangle below the two of them to confirm. Does that work?

Yup!

And there's a reply to her email to the PRT!

To: Padparadscha
From: Parahuman Relations

Hello, Padparadscha! We would be very interested in having a parahuman with your power join the Protectorate and suggest that you make your way to the nearest PRT headquarters to discuss the details of a potential contract in a more secure setting. If you need help financing such a trip, we can provide you with a travel stipend via mail or courier to the address of your choice.

Regarding some of your questions:

The Protectorate will not require you to heal only people it selects, but we do suggest that you arrange any work you'd like to do in-costume through our public relations department, so that we can provide you with support from other parahumans in case of disruptions.

You're welcome to work with the Protectorate as a contractor, though this option doesn't allow us to provide you with as much security.

If you do join the Protectorate, you're free to quit or retire at any time.

We don't require any documentation or tests from parahumans joining the Protectorate and you're welcome to keep your legal identity private.

Thank you for your interest in joining the Protectorate.

Joel Smith
Parahuman Relations

She really should have thought this through more, because now she's looking at a whole letter in English and she has no idea what two thirds of these words mean. She wants to try and look for a dictionary of some sort....but doing that would leave the computer unattended. There are other people here unlike last time. She definitely does not want people to see it.

She'll instead take ten minutes to copy out the entirety of the letter on her note sheet, underlining all the words she doesn't recognize. She's not planning on replying today. She wants to check in with Denice first so she can take a look at it, and help her draft another letter. Understanding a passage is one thing, writing one is another.

She is going to click 'X' to exit – does that get rid of the screen with the email?

It does, yes.

Great! In that case she'll take all her stuff and go to Anne to say "I'm done with computers now. Thank you."

"Thank you!"

Will she do anything else while she's at the library?

Yes! She'll try to look for dictionaries. Maybe learner's dictionaries or dictionaries for young people or those with illustrations? Once she finds one, she'll sit down and read the letter using the dictionaries as a reference. It's very difficult. A lot of the words the letter used aren't concrete, so even though she got an illustrated dictionary, well, only some of the entries are illustrated, and the rest have pure text. Which means she'll have to read those and not know the words there, and thus causing her to recursively look up more and more words.

Marina is a disciplined researcher who has participated in transcribing and translating Old Towan transcriptions from ruins, but it doesn't make it easy. At the end she's on the verge of running out of space on her note paper from all the things she's written on it.

Alright. What does she want to do now. She thinks...she thinks she wants to negotiate some sort of probationary contract with the PRT, where she won't be fully integrated into the system, but she'll be paid – and being paid earlier is better – and she'll get a better of idea of how the PRT operates and whether she wants to sink herself into it. See, Joel Smith said that she'd be free to quit or retire at any time, but she doesn't know whether there are conditions attached to that, such as say, 'she can leave at any time but then you have to pay money if you leave before this set duration'. 

She might reconsider later, but that initial plan seems good. She'll leave and go back to Denice.

She's walked several miles today and Flowers Practitioner or no, she's kind of getting tired. Not super tired, but moderately tired.

Denice is waiting when Marina gets back; she probably hasn't spent the whole time sitting in that one spot but there's no sign of anything else she might have been up to.

Yeah, she would get terribly antsy if she had to stay like that the whole time. Marina doesn't try to examine what Denice has been doing in the intervening time, or whether or not she left, but instead goes straight into recounting her experience at the library. Marina will show the email she received to Denice.

:What do you think about what the PRT person said? Do you think they're trustworthy? Do you think I should try going to the nearest PRT headquarters? I actually wanted to try to see where it was, but sadly I forgot to ask you how to access the map on the computer, and I didn't know enough English to get the computer to display it.:

:I'm not sure how to tell if they're trustworthy,: she starts, and then looks the email over again. :I think they're worried about something bad happening to you, see this part?: She points out where they mention providing her with security. :And this one,: where they mention disruptions. :That might be a threat, too, I don't know.:

:That's true. I didn't...I didn't think about that. Back in Kosofo I didn't worry about my safety – I had my knife and I had my Flowers spells, but here...it does seem like the average cape is better at fighting than the average practitioner. I suppose if I approached the place with a cape outfit on, someone might attack me.:

She thinks about it for a little bit.

:I think it's worth it for me to go, if the place isn't far, or if it's on the way to New York or in New York. Do you know if there's one there? If not, I'll go to the library again tomorrow to look at the computer map, or cast Be My Ears for you using animal bones tomorrow noon. Or wait, no, we were concerned that the computer map might track and transmit our location. Hm. I might ask the librarian for a paper map instead.:

:There's one in New York, yeah. I think we can get directions from the computer without too much risk - I'd have it give me directions to like ten places, and then they won't know which one we're really going to. A paper map is still better if you can get one without having to tell someone what map you're looking for, but I don't know if you can.:

:That's good. And yes, I agree. I think I'll try asking for a paper map first, of the surrounding areas here, that covers the nearby cities, and one of New York. In the case the maps don't mark the PRT headquarters, I'll try the computer misdirection plan. I'll ask you for names of places here later, so I know what to put in the computer as red herrings.

My other concern was cape costumes. I think that the PRT, if they accept me, will give me materials or money to sew or buy my own costume. But, they also said that they wouldn't require me to reveal my civilian identity to them, and I'd rather not do that. Especially since I kind of don't have one. I think what I might do is come there wearing just a mask to hide my face. It seems easier than getting a whole outfit, and also gives me most of the benefit of the outfit anyway. Where do you think we could get something like that? And materials for your cape costume too – since you won't be able to access the PRT's help, if you're planning on breaking the other kids out before I approach them.

What I mean is that, if I have a contract with the PRT already, I can give you some of the money I earn so you can buy costume materials. Or, I can buy them for you and leave them at a spot you can access.:

:I don't need a costume yet, I'm not going to be getting the other kids out this year. I want to be out for a year myself first so I know I can do it.: She's obviously not happy about this, but she seems set on it.

:I don't know where we'd get a mask but I'll listen around, maybe I can find some.:

She would be unhappy too, in her case! She's kind of impatient. She was less so before she awakened in Flowers, she remembers.

:Alright. And thank you for looking out for where we might be able to get a mask.:

:I'm not planning on going out again today, so I'm going to take a shower and wash my clothes too, and then hang it up. Hopefully it will have dried tomorrow, even though it will be inside.: And she will do so.

When she gets out of the shower, Denice asks her to wake her up at sunset, and curls up in the corner to sleep.

Marina will say that she will, and she's going to go over her language notes until sunset. She really wants to make flashcards, but this will have to do for now. She'll write down some of the words that she heard verbally when she was out and about, and ask Denice about whether she spelled them correctly when she wakes up.

She kind of wants to eat more, but she'll wait until Denice wakes up so that they can eat together.